Forecasting Container Security in 2021 - 6 Things to Expect

By Fei Huang (Chief Strategy Officer) and Glen Kosaka (VP Product Management) at NeuVector

Enterprise developer, DevOps, and DevSecOps teams stand on shifting ground heading into 2021 - and perhaps nowhere will that be more apparent than security strategy, tactics, and risk visibility and mitigation.

Here are six predictions I expect to see:

1) Cloud spending will increase, hybrid will become the norm, and security automation will swell.

Spending on cloud services will continue to rise at its ever-accelerating pace. Maybe it'll slow down someday, but 2021 isn't going to be that year. More enterprises will move applications to the cloud - and particularly to container and serverless infrastructures. As application deployment patterns increase in complexity, hybrid-cloud and multi-tenant setups will reach ubiquity. 

Thorough security policy and execution will continue to be critical for protecting these applications from breaches, as attackers look to capitalize on enterprises rushing to container and serverless environments without adequately evolving their security strategy to match. Security automation will thus be key to keeping pace with the speed of DevOps. In pursuit of this automation, enterprises will increasingly adopt infrastructure-as-code practices in 2021, as well as compliance audits to deal with ever-more-stringent regulations, and role-based access controls.

2) Security policy-as-code adoption will skyrocket as technologies mature.

Developers will capitalize on easier opportunities to utilize maturing technologies that enable security policy-as-code, and those implementations will greatly simplify and improve production-stage security enforcement. More developers will discover that modern solutions have rendered security policy-as-code especially developer-friendly. This security automation now allows for policies to be maintained in a source code repository, and leveraged throughout the CI/CD process and into production.

3) Behavior detection comes to the forefront of production workload security.

Enterprises will increasingly turn to behavioral learning-based security strategies as a newer approach to locking down (and preventing) abnormal activities within their production environments. Those that still depend on traditional signature-based threat detection will increasingly realize that their solutions aren't efficient or quick enough to effectively secure modern dynamic workloads, such as those used by container or serverless applications. DevOps security requires threat detection methods that are fast, lightweight, immutable, and built to operate inline and at scale. Behavior detection checks those boxes, and will secure a growing number of production workloads throughout 2021.

4) Zero-trust networking models will enable more practical threat intelligence.

Data is foundational to achieving effective security intelligence. At the same time, distributed cloud and DevSecOps professionals have faced a significant challenge when it comes to producing accurate and useful security data from myriad log events. To solve this challenge, these professionals will embrace security solutions that leverage zero-trust networking models to create their own sources of truth in the coming year. Expect threat intelligence to become all the more practical and actionable, which will be a breath of fresh air to many enterprises struggling to get this right.

5) The focus on Kubernetes security will intensify.

Kubernetes is the de facto cloud workload platform. As companies embrace new methods to build applications with distributed Kubernetes environments in 2021, they'll naturally pursue security tooling specifically designed to protect Kubernetes (including protecting against vulnerabilities that don't have ready-made patches, such as seen recently with CVE-2020-8554). Defending the large-scale distributed security perimeter Kubernetes presents will require automated, purpose-built security that safeguards workloads at anytime and anywhere in the cloud.

6) Enterprises will reorganize around cloud-native pipeline workflows.

As part of these reorganization efforts I expect to see throughout 2021, security, operations, and compliance management will be structured according to their most efficient fit within the CI/CD pipeline, and through into production. This reorganization trend will seek to eliminate manual processes and configurations, and ensure that any remaining manual activities don't slow the pipeline. Organizations will increasingly examine all activities and requirements to determine how to best automate and efficiently manage their cloud workflows.

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About the Authors

Fei Huang is the Chief Strategy Officer at NeuVector, a container security company that protects Kubernetes from pipeline to production. Fei has 20+ years of experience in enterprise security, virtualization, cloud and embedded software.

Glen Kosaka is the VP of Product Management at NeuVector. Glen has over 20 years of experience in enterprise security, marketing SaaS, and infrastructure software. He has held executive management positions at Trend Micro, Provilla, Reactivity, Resonate, Quantum and Rignite.