As cloud infrastructures become widely adopted across many organizations, some are also moving their software projects to the cloud — specifically containerized environments. While this move brings agility and scale with it, a false assumption can also arise: “My applications are inside containers, so they are secure.” In reality, however, it’s often the opposite.
Putting applications into containers does not make them secure. For example, legacy applications may include previously unknown vulnerabilities. Container images may have vulnerabilities that date back several years and can rely on older frameworks that have known vulnerabilities. Containerized applications can run with excessive permissions, and the cloud itself can be misconfigured and leak data.
In all cases, applications and images do not gain security benefits simply from being containerized. Vulnerabilities will still exist, but you may just not know about them. Furthermore, managing security in the cloud follows the same basic rules as managing on-premises environments.
What Are Containers?
Before diving deeper into the topic, let’s define the word “container.” Although containerization in the cloud is a concept that has been gaining momentum across all sectors, not everyone knows what containers are and how they fit into the larger concept of a cloud environment.
The best analogy for containers are those colorful shipping boxes you see on large ships. Each box contains a set of goods, however, since you did not develop or pack the goods, you cannot see them nor know which types of goods are inside each one. Each container is a separate box that does not interact with the other boxes, a ..
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