Container security offers great help in restricting cyber threats by blocking malicious entities from infiltrating your wider network. As the name implies, it seals and protects variables within the containers. So, what is container security, why is important, and how does it work?
What Is Container Security?
Data exposure is a serious concern as it affects everyone. If you run a network, your sensitive data and software applications are at risk by default. Container security helps you secure your data by building a fence around your assets. You can create, test, and implement programs in different cyber environments as long as your containers are secure.
Container security is the process of protecting the systems covering your software applications to ensure they function as they are designed to. It includes protecting specific versions of programming language runtimes, libraries, infrastructure, and the software supply chain. Container security is a proactive method you can use to protect your network from internal and external influences.
As an abstract-based application, container security improves productivity and operational efficiency, giving you control over any form of systemic or malicious cyberattack. It makes it easy for you to implement, deploy, and maintain cybersecurity strategies and processes to protect against cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
Why Is Container Security Important?
As your business grows, you have an obligation to secure your digital assets with a standard cyber-infrastructure. Getting it right helps you save costs, prevent errors, and enhance your operations in the long run.
With container security, you can enjoy various security benefits such as improved application isolation, which helps you avoid mishaps such as sensitive data exposure.
Here are some important benefits of container security.
1. Easy to Set Up
Container security includes the management and storage of security tools, schedulers, and monitoring systems, which makes hosting your company’s setup a lot easier.
2. General Automation
From load balancing to orchestration, container security helps you manage and automate your IT processes as designed to protect your network’s integrity.
3. Simplified Administration of Processes
Good container security management makes it easier for your IT team to manage and maintain their containerized environments. It also reduces the amount of time and resources you need for DevOps activities.
4. Scalability
You can set up containerized applications on different operating systems and hardware platforms. This will help speed up the development, testing, and production cycles.
How Does Container Security Work?
Container security works in numerous ways, but the end goal is always the same—to protect your network’s infrastructure against threats. Containers store the components you require to operate software in your network successfully. These components include files, environment variables, dependencies, and libraries.
Since the operating system places restrictions on how much access the container has to the host’s physical resources such as the CPU, storage, and memory, a single container cannot use up all the available physical resources. As such, containers can be an attractive target for malicious actors due to the massive increase in container deployment in production environments.
A single container is vulnerable to attacks and has the potential to serve as an entry point into a network’s larger environment. The objective of all container security solutions is to prevent harmful activity within your container environment. This is done through the following steps:
1. Deploying Image Scanning
These security systems enable cybersecurity teams to gain insight into containerized applications—allowing them to obtain a deeper understanding of what occurs within. This makes it easier for security professionals to identify threats and halt them before they can do damage.
Images undergo vulnerability scanning before the container starts up, and when you install new software, more vulnerability tests are run. This feature is important for finding potential risks as you continue to make containers and apps that run inside containers because it lets you find weak spots.
2. Restricting Access Control and Process Monitoring
Sometimes, cyber threats occur internally, not externally. Container security helps you keep an eye on both these channels by allowing your team controlled access to your network.
With container security, team members get the access privileges they need to do their jobs, without stepping beyond boundaries. It’s your responsibility to review their access regularly, and container security helps you do just that.
3. Monitoring the Log Files
Containers make log files for suspicious or malicious activities; the system reads the log files thoroughly, and looks for specific text patterns and rules that determine significant cyber threats. Once it identifies that a potentially destructive event has occurred, the monitoring system sends out an alert. This alert may be sent to a client database or another software or hardware device.
Monitoring logs can help you figure out what security problems have happened or might happen in the future.
These functionalities can be found in several container security platforms. Apart from maintaining safety at your workplace, they make it feasible for cybersecurity teams to gain visibility into containers, which in turn, improves the teams’ capacity to comprehend the actions that are taking place within containerized apps. As a result of this, it’s much easier for security professionals to find potential threats and stop them before they can do any damage.
Secure Your Digital Assets With Container Security
Container security might be a relatively new technological development, but it boasts of in-demand and cutting-edge security techniques. It ensures the implementation and upkeep of the security controls that safeguard containers and their underlying infrastructure.
An attacker’s range of action can be restricted by employing preventative strategies when constructing, distributing, and executing your container with the necessary privileges and protections. And that’s because the majority of containerized applications and their underlying infrastructure are dynamic and distributed.
