The complex nature of the cloud environment demands significantly more effort than traditional cybersecurity can offer. Major players in the cloud services race are striving to establish themselves by doubling down on their cloud security efforts. Alphabet’s billion-dollar deal with Wiz is the latest testament to that. However, mere acquisitions and mergers will not solve cloud security problems such as frequent IP changes, shared workloads, multi-tenancy, etc. This is why the Kubernetes firewall by Aviatrix is an essential step towards cloud-native security.
Challenges in Protecting Cloud-native Environment
The ephemeral nature of the cloud is a gift more often than not, with infrastructure-agnostic computing, globally accessible resources, better computing power. However, when it comes to security, cloud-native environments need policies and measures that align with their dynamic way of functioning rather than restricting them. This is why the following challenges occur in ensuring cloud-native security:
- Tracking IP Addresses: Traditional security measures like perimeter-based firewalls rely heavily on static IP addresses. However, when dealing with cloud-native workloads like containers, microservices, VMs, and more, the IP addresses are dynamic and keep changing.
- Multi-cloud Challenges: The rising adoption of multi-cloud environments further perplexes security efforts as different cloud services come with varying networking models, IAM policies, and other controls. Such fragmentation renders traditional security measures useless, leading to unmonitored cloud traffic.
- DevSecOps Integration: DevSecOps strategies are essential to protect the modern CI/CD pipelines without slowing them down. However, integrating DevSecOps with cloud makes enforcing security measures like automated security testing and Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) monitoring more complex. Moreover, different organizations also make their DevSecOps teams employ different security models, which raises more challenges for effective security management.
How Does Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall Help?
Kubernetes is the dominant platform in cloud-native environments, offering features such as container orchestration, dynamic workload management, and handling multi-cloud operations. Therefore, Kubernetes-based security policies will prove highly effective for cloud-native security. Here’s how Aviatrix made this happen:
- Kubernetes Namespace Identities: To deal with the limitations of dynamic IP addresses, the Kubernetes Firewall uses security policies based on the Kubernetes namespace. This ensures the security policies remain workload-aware and consistent across the cloud environments.
- Protecting Critical Workloads: Kubernetes clusters are responsible for handling AI/ML workloads, financial applications, enterprise services, and more such critical workloads. With the help of the Kubernetes Firewall, Aviatrix offers Zero Trust Segmentation that ensures consistent security across these clusters.
- Flexibility for DevSecOps: The Kubernetes Firewall allows smooth integration with DevSecOps workflows. It supports YAML, Terraform, and various organizational security models. This helps protect policy-based controls for cloud-native and prevents attacks like data exfiltration and unauthorized access.
Conclusion
It is practically impossible to envision any developments in the digital landscape without any cloud environments in sight. That is why the advanced solution for cloud-native security offered by Aviatrix helps organizations to evolve their security policies for futuristic workloads. As Kubernetes plays an essential role in these ecosystems, the Kubernetes Firewall offers businesses more control over their cloud security than ever before.
