State of the market: Container security tools secure containerized applications at every stage of their lifecycle, from development through to runtime. They offer protection against vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, security breaches, and compliance deviations.
- The global container security market was estimated at USD 2.7 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.3% to reach a value of USD 8.2 billion by 2030.
- Growth is being driven primarily by the increasing adoption of containerized applications in DevOps environments globally, due to the rise of complex microservices architectures and increasing reliance on cloud-native technologies.
- Because containers are used to deploy apps across dynamic environments—including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud—and they frequently interact with other containers, services, and networks, they’re exposed to a wide range of security threats.
- The increase in cyberattacks targeting cloud-native applications, combined with the adoption of DevSecOps practices and a “shift left” approach to security, are encouraging development teams to prioritize security within their containerized environments.
- As the market continues to grow, we’re seeing demand for automation to help lower the management overhead on security teams and scalability to protect large numbers of containers within complex microservices architectures.
- As a result of this, we can expect to see container security solutions embracing AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics in the coming years.
Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading container security platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their container security challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the container security space.
You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best container security products on the market in our Virtualization Hub and our DevOps Hub.
Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your container security implementation:
- For best security practice: Follow the principle of least privilege when setting up components within a containerized hosting stack. This means you should only give users, admins, and containers the lowest level of permissions required to do their job, as it will help prevent identity-related breaches and unauthorized access.
- For reducing the workload: Use the “shift left” approach and integrate your security tool early in your development pipeline. This will minimize the number of issues to have to fix later in the development cycle, saving you time and money. We also recommend creating default container images with security in mind to reduce the workload for future container deployments.
- For quicker threat response: Integrate your container security solution with your broader security stack for alerting. This will allow your team to respond to potential container security threats more quickly and effectively.
How container security works: Container security tools are typically deployed in one of four ways:
- In an agent-based deployment, you install a lightweight security agent on each node where containers run. These agents enforce policies and collect telemetry data, which they report to you via a centralized management console.
- In an agentless deployment, the solution integrates directly with the container orchestrator, then relies on APIs for image scanning, network monitoring, and runtime analysis.
- In a sidecar container deployment, the solution runs as a separate, isolated “sidecar” container in the same pod as your application containers. This deployment is most common in-service mesh architectures.
- In a host-based deployment, the solution runs on the host level and monitors container activity from the outside.
Once implemented, container security solutions provide protection at multiple layers. This allows them to secure your containerized apps from development right through runtime.
Before your containers are deployed, the solution scans them for vulnerabilities at the image layer and makes sure that container images comply with your security policies. It also works with vulnerability repositories to identify known CVEs.
Once you’ve deployed your containers, the container security solution will regulate traffic flow and continuously monitor your containers at runtime for abnormal or malicious activities, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance deviations. The exact features on offer will vary between different solutions, but you can find a list of recommended features to look out for later in this guide.
Benefits of container security: There are four main benefits to implementing a container security solution:
- Deploy software more efficiently.
- By implementing standardized security practices into your CI/CD pipeline, you can develop applications securely from the outset.
- This saves you from spending more time (and money!) fixing vulnerabilities further down the line.
- “To put it in the context of medical conditions, some people wait until they have a broken arm or they’re deathly sick to see the doctor,” Glen Pendley, Chief Technology Officer at Tenable, tells Expert Insights in an exclusive interview. “But if you want to live a long, healthy life, you get check-ups, which are preventative medicine, to try to stay healthy.”
- Reduce the risk of a security incident or breach.
- Container security tools offer a wealth of advanced security features, such as malware scanning, role-based access controls, microsegmentation, and automated incident response—all of which reduce the risk of your application being compromised or breached.
- Achieve compliance with regulatory frameworks and industry regulations.
- By enforcing security policies and logging container activity, container security tools can help you achieve—and prove—compliance with data protection standards.
- Some solutions also monitor your container environment for compliance deviations or drift, allowing you to quickly catch and remediate any instances of non-compliance.
- Improve resource allocation.
- By giving you greater visibility into how your containers are operating and their dependencies, container security solutions can help you identify where more or fewer resources are needed and reduce costs associated with security management.
Common container security challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing container security. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:
- Container environments are dynamic, ephemeral, complex, and still relatively new. Because of this, it can be a challenge to find security professionals with the right skillset and experience to manage a container security solution. If you don’t have the skills required in-house, we recommend investing in container security as a managed service to help your SOC navigate some of the more nuanced tasks.
- Because containers have a short lifecycle and containerized apps are frequently switched out or updated with new components and frameworks, it can be difficult to keep on top of vulnerabilities. Your container security solution should triage vulnerabilities based on their risk and severity, so make sure you follow its recommendations when it comes to prioritizing remediation actions.
- Combatting known vulnerabilities before they can be exploited is one of the top challenges associated with container security. We recommend using a container security tool that scans images, dependencies, and workloads throughout your CI/CD pipeline to help you identify vulnerabilities and mitigate them before they reach production.
Best container security providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of container security solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:
- The Top 10 Container Security Tools
- The Top 8 Kubernetes Security Solutions
- The Top 10 Container Management Solutions
- The Top 10 Container Orchestration Tools
Features checklist: When comparing container security solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:
- Container image scanning: The solution should work with CVE repositories to scan container images for vulnerabilities before deployment. It should also verify the integrity of images by checking for signs of unauthorized alteration or tampering, and ensure only trusted and signed images are deployed.
- Runtime threat detection: The solution should use ML or rules-based detection to continuously monitor your containerized applications and infrastructure for anomalous behavior and suspicious activity, such as unsecure configurations, unauthorized access, privilege escalations, and unpatched vulnerabilities.
- Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC): You should be able to define access policies based on users’ roles within your organization to help prevent unauthorized access and privilege misuse.
- Network policy management: You should be able to implement micro-segmentation to control container-to-container communication and prevent the lateral movement of threats within clusters.
- Compliance enforcement: The solution should create detailed logs of all container activity for forensic analysis and compliance purposes. It should also identify any misconfigurations in your access controls, network policies, and secrets management processes.
- Automatic remediation: The solution should offer a range of automated remediation actions to help stop or block discovered threats, e.g., isolating compromised containers or patching known vulnerabilities.
- Integration: The solution should integrate easily with your existing CI/CD pipelines and any other security tools you’re currently using.
Future trends: As the container security market continues to grow, we expect providers to continue to embrace advancements in technology and new ways of thinking about security to provide better protection.
We primarily expect to see container security providers continue to embrace artificial intelligence to fulfil three key use cases:
- By leveraging AI to improve their automation capabilities, container security tools will be able to manage repetitive security tasks such as CI/CD pipeline scans, vulnerability assessments, and compliance checks, and even certain remediation tasks such as deploying patches or isolating compromised containers. This not only reduces the mean time to respond to threats, but it frees up valuable—and limited—security resource to work on more complex tasks.
- With AI-powered anomaly detection and predictive analytics, container security tools will be able to detect unusual activity and provide early warnings or predictions of potential breaches with high levels of accuracy.
- Some container security tools already offer the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities and alerts based on risk and severity, but as developments in AI continue, we expect this feature to become more commonplace—and more accurate. This will make a huge difference to security teams managing large containerized environments that can potentially have thousands of containers deployed at once.
Second, we expect container security tools to continue to embrace the DevSecOps mindset and place more emphasis on shifting security left so that developers are building cloud-native apps that are secure by design. In practice, this will mean focusing on seamlessly integrating with CI/CD pipelines and delivering fast, accurate, and automated securing testing, vulnerability scans, and compliance checks early in the development cycle.
Finally, container security providers will continue to align their solutions with the zero trust mindset by requiring all containers, users, and devices to verify their identities, regardless of their privilege or location.
- “When we talk about ‘zero trust’, it’s actually maybe most valuable to simply say: every request to any resource you care about needs to use multi-factor authentication and use some sort of device management,” Alex Weinart, Director of Identity Security at Microsoft, tells Expert Insights. “For the average person, that’s the answer. Zero Trust equals strong device, strong identity. That’s it.”
This could mean we’ll see more container security tools offering behavior monitoring technology (which again links back to advancements in AI and ML) and implementing their own MFA or IAM tools, or—alternatively—offering more integrations with popular identity providers.
Further reading: You can find all our articles on container security in our Virtualization Hub and our DevOps Hub.
Want to jump straight in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:
- Shortlist: The Top 10 Container Security Tools
- Interview: Glen Pendley On “Left Of Boom” Security And The Inspiration Behind The Tenable One Platform
- Blog: Expert CISO Advice On Building An Effective DevSecOps Team
- Blog: Expert Tips On Meeting Data Security Challenges
