Containers represent an upleveling of cloud infrastructure from physical and virtual machines toward applications. As a direct consequence of increased thrust on software and applications that enterprises across all verticals are placing as part of their digital transformation, container adoption has been on the rise with a large number of enterprises moving their production workloads from physical and virtual machines into containers and Kubernetes environments.

The move toward containers is characterized by a change across two dimensions. First, security awareness, which is typically limited to the production infrastructure, is being extended to earlier stages of application development (“shift-left”). Second, the security signal captured at runtime, which is typically limited to infrastructure-level events, is being extended to include application-level events such as container context (“shift-up”). A modern cloud security platform must account for these fundamental changes and provide a holistic solution that effectively blends traditional security capabilities with ones required by modern environments.