Cloud Native and App Modernization Security Concerns – Exploring Container Security

Cloud Native and App Modernization

Cloud Native and App Modernization Security Concerns – Exploring Container Security

  • Improved Portability: Containers give developers the ability to create smaller, better-performing workloads for their applications. This makes it easier to port and migrate workloads from on-premises to public and private cloud networks.
  • Improved Workload Automation: With container orchestration services, it has become increasingly easier for developers to automate the deployment of centralized workloads across hybrid architectures. This results in a significant improvement in the scalability of containerized workloads by enabling developers to automatically augment additional clusters to their existing infrastructure resulting in lower application downtime and better performance.
  • Faster cloud-native development: For most organizations, when developers write, test, and deploy applications inside containers, the environment stays the same regardless of where the application resides. Such a configuration is the ideal cloud-native state. Eventually, as organizations move to PaaS and serverless infrastructures, containers give them the flexibility they need to quickly pivot and deploy their application seamlessly without interruption across a variety of hosting services.
  • Microservices and containers: Microservices-based applications can also benefit significantly from containerization. Because containers offer isolation at the operating system level, multiple components can run off a single Operating System license, helping organizations significantly reduce their costs.

  • “Lift and shift” existing applications into modern cloud architectures: Some organizations use containers to migrate existing applications into more modern environments that help them reduce overall costs and eliminate all concerns surrounding hardware procurement and refresh.
  • Refactor existing applications for containers: Although refactoring is much more intensive than lift-and-shift migration, it enables the full benefits of a container environment and gives developers the opportunity to repay the technical debt that gets built into the application over time.
  • Develop new container-native applications: Much like refactoring, this approach unlocks the full benefits of containers.
  • Provide better support for micro-services architectures: Distributed applications and micro-services can be more easily isolated, deployed, and scaled using individual container building blocks.
  • Provide DevOps support for Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Container technology supports streamlined build, test, and deployment from the same container images.
  • Provide easier deployment of repetitive jobs and tasks: Containers are being deployed to support one or more similar processes, which often run in the background, such as ETL functions or batch jobs.

Finally, organizations need to ensure robust visibility and audit mechanism are in place and must treat any breaches or near misses with a sense of urgency. It is important to periodically schedule Cloud Security Posture Assessment and adopt a Security Analysis Platform that provides continuous visibility to potential threats to the organization’s IT estate. Standard Operating Procedures to deal with various scenarios also need to be defined and audited, along with robust response frameworks for various eventualities and potential threats.

Related Topics:

Cyber-forward Cloud Strategy for Secure Cloud Deployment and Migration

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) – All you need to know!

Bridging the Visibility Gap on Cloud

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