Organizations are increasingly turning to containers to fuel their digital transformations. According to BMC, a 2019 survey found that more than 87% of respondents were running containers—up from 55% just two years earlier. Additionally, 90% of survey participants that were running applications in containers were doing so in production. That was up from 84% in 2018 and two-thirds of surveyed IT professionals a year before that.

The Benefits and Challenges of Containers

According to Kubernetes’ documentation, containers are lightweight and decoupled from the underlying infrastructure. These properties make it easier for admins to port containers across their cloud environments and OS distributions in support of their business needs. They are also much easier to create than virtual machines (VMs), which helps organizations that are looking to horizontally scale their container environments.

That said, organizations are running into some security challenges with their containers along the way. In a 2019 Tripwire survey, for instance, 60% of IT security professionals who managed environments with containers at companies consisting of over 100 employees admitted that their employers had suffered at least one container security incident in the preceding 12 months. Three-quarters of respondents working at organizations with over 100 containers in production went on to tell Tripwire that they had suffered a container security incident in that same period of time. Not surprisingly, 94% of survey participants disclosed the fact that they were concerned about their organization’s container security posture.

Where that Leaves Organizations

Organizations want to enjoy the benefits of using containers, as described above. They don’t want to suffer a security incident. Acknowledging that reality, developers and security professionals need to minimize the security issues confronting the container images. That’s especially the case with the container images that they’re creating themselves.

Presented below are some best practices that (Read more...)