
Heroku
CloudPassage Halo is a security solution that helps brands and businesses in finance, e-commerce, healthcare, gaming, B2B SaaS, biotech and digital media sectors safeguard cloud infrastructures. The CloudPassage Halo allows users ...Read more
ThreatWatch is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses conduct risk assessments and identify potential vulnerabilities across applications. Professionals can utilize natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to collect dat...Read more
Google Container Security is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses secure container environments across Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Professionals can isolate workloads in a sub-VM...Read more
CloudGuard is a container security solution that helps businesses handle posture management, vulnerability assessment and workload protection operations. It enables DevOps teams to identify compliance risks and security threats, d...Read more
Tenable.io is a cloud security solution that helps businesses in the energy, transportation, automotive, education, retail, finance and other industries streamline operations related to vulnerability management, incident response,...Read more
WhiteSource is the leading solution for agile open source security and license compliance management. It integrates with your development environments and DevOps pipeline to detect open source libraries with security or comp...Read more
Threat Stack is a cloud-based security platform designed to helps enterprises detect and respond to risks across system infrastructure and applications in real-time. Features include audit log, single sign-on (SSO), user managemen...Read more
Qualys Cloud is a network security management software designed to help businesses monitor IT assets and prioritize threats in real-time. Administrators can receive alerts regarding vulnerabilities, suspicious activities and attac...Read more
Orca Security is a vulnerability assessment platform that provides businesses with tools to identify potential threats across the system and remediate them accordingly. Professionals can use the built-in SideScanning technology to...Read more
Containers are standard software packages used to build, test, and deploy applications on multiple environments. They include all the required executables, binary codes, libraries, and configuration files except the operating system image. This makes them lightweight and portable. Also, they offer agile deployment capabilities and need less coordination and oversight than on-premise or virtualization infrastructure.
Despite these benefits, containers create security challenges. You have to secure the container host, the applications within the container, and the container management stack, among others. To address these security issues, you can use a container security software platform.
Container security software scans containers for vulnerabilities and policy violations and provides remediation for any identified threats. It’s used to secure the various components of containerized applications, such as container images and code repositories, along with their infrastructure and connected networks.
In this buyers guide, we explain what container security software is, its common features and benefits, and the considerations and trends you should keep in mind during software selection.
Here's what we'll cover:
Container security software is a software tool that helps businesses manage and secure containerized files, applications, systems, and their supporting networks. It protects the cloud computing infrastructure running containerized applications from vulnerabilities in the IT environment. It simulates attacks from common threat actors to detect container vulnerabilities more thoroughly rather than simply relying on standard security scans.
The software provides centralized information about the entire container environment, including details of the docker engine and client, plugins, image registries, and image metadata. It also has an access control mechanism that allows administrators to decide which users can access the containerized data and apps.
Here are some common features of container security software:
Container scanning | Scan container images or pods deployed to production for vulnerabilities or compliance issues. |
Vulnerability management | Detect, classify, prioritize, and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities to your containerized applications. |
Policy management | Enforce security policies to block the use of container images that are vulnerable to threats or incidents. |
Continuous integration (CI) | Integrate the software with container registries and orchestration platforms. CI establishes a consistent and automated way to build, package, and test applications. |
Container inventory visibility | Gather topographic information about container projects—images, image registries, deployments, runtime behavior, and containers spun from the images—to get complete visibility into your container inventory. |
Runtime security | Ensure security during the runtime phase of deployment. This added layer of security helps detect and respond to security threats to the containers running in your environment. |
Compliance | Address security challenges in containers to ensure they’re compliant with standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) benchmarks. |
Security alerts | Receive real-time security alerts when new issues are reported or when vulnerable components are added to your container stacks. |
Priority scoring | Assess security risk across your IT environment and assign priority scores to them to focus your remediation efforts. |
Understanding the different types of buyers will help you identify your needs better and make an informed purchase. The majority of buyers in the container security market belong to one of the following categories:
Listed below are the key benefits of using container security software:
Let’s go through a few considerations you should keep in mind when selecting a container security tool:
Here’s a recent trend in the container security software market that you should be aware of:
Note: The application selected in this guide is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been taken from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.