IT organizations have evolved quickly in recent years—from traditional IT to a more agile DevOps approach, and now to containers. While businesses are racing to embrace containers, though, data from Forrester Research suggests that one of the biggest roadblocks they face is security. There are tools available for process monitoring, vulnerability management, and configuration management, but security teams still struggle to inspect network traffic that targets the container—leaving them susceptible to a container or host-based compromise. Alert Logic has introduced an IDS capability for containers that solves this problem.

 

[See Related Post: What is Container Security?]

 

Skyrocketing Adoption of Software Containers

Containers are one of the hottest things in technology right now. A report from 451 Research claims that application containers will see the fastest growth compared to other segments, and estimates annual growth in the container market to be 40 percent over the next few years. Organizations are adopting containers for a variety of uses, including production apps, mobility applications, cloud-native applications, and more.

The primary drivers for container adoption are speed and cost. The small, modular nature of containers helps streamline development, and provides an ability to scale app components in a more precise way that cuts cost at the same time. At Alert Logic, we estimate that we’ve saved upwards of 60 percent on our AWS billing. Owen Rogers and Jay Lyman, analysts at 451 Research, declared, “In fact, we have found that double-digit resource savings are achievable even with relatively simple implementations.”

Challenges of Container Security

As with just about any new technology, though, the benefits of containers come with a number of unique security concerns as well. For example:

  • Lack of real-time detection capabilities: Organizations do not have a way to accurately detect intrusions in containerized environments because non-native detection and legacy IDS tools are not capable of depicting threat activity in containers in real time.
  • No visibility in metadata changes: It’s difficult to get the information you need to understand the threats in a containerized environment so you can determine next steps to effectively deal with the problem.
  • Undetected attackers and intruders lurking: Without real-time visibility, attackers can linger in your containers and execute malicious code like Trojans, cryptominers, and other malware, or corrupt or exfiltrate data.

Alert Logic Network Intrusion Detection for Containers

Alert Logic offers the industry’s first network intrusion detection system (IDS) to protect container deployments, available in Alert Logic Cloud Defender and Threat Manager solutions. With Alert Logic’s intrusion detection for containers, within just a few minutes, you will see if exploits are targeting your containers. Plus, Alert Logic security experts are watching your environment 24×7 so you’re never on your own.

Alert Logic intrusion detection for containers improves AWS security for Cloud workloads with proactive notification of suspicious activity within your containers and detects cyber attacks in real-time by analyzing the signature of data packets as they traverse the container environment. You get greater visibility of the potential impact with a graphical representation of the compromised containers and their relationships, and informed advice and remediation guidance from Alert Logic’s security operations experts in our world-class Security Operations Center so you can quickly take the appropriate action.

“As Accesso continues to focus on our industry-leading technology and security infrastructure, we need to ensure our containerized environment is protected without introducing additional complexity,” said William DeMar, Director, Information Security, Accesso Technology. “With Alert Logic, we have extended IDS security monitoring and detection to the container level and have gained more granular visibility into our container environments across multiple cloud platforms. Alert Logic partnered with us to get up and running quickly, and their team of security analysts and consultants proactively escalates incidents so we can prioritize our team’s efforts.”

You can’t afford not to run containers, but even more than that you can’t afford to run containers that aren’t secure. For more information, visit Alert Logic’s container security solutions page.

Fortra's Alert Logic
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Fortra's Alert Logic

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