Worried About Container Security? Network Intrusion Detection Can Help

IT organizations have evolved quickly in recent years — from traditional IT to a more agile DevOps approach, and now to containers. While businesses are racing to embrace containers, though, one of the biggest roadblocks they face is security. There are tools available for process monitoring, vulnerability management, and configuration management, but security teams still struggle to inspect network traffic that targets the container — leaving them susceptible to a container or host-based compromise. At Alert Logic, we’re providing the network intrusion detection for containers that solves this problem.

Containers are revolutionizing the tech landscape. Their adoption is soaring across industries for everything from production applications to mobility and cloud-native solutions.

What’s fueling this surge? Speed and cost-efficiency. Containers’ lightweight, modular design accelerates development while enabling highly targeted scaling of app components—leading to significant cost savings. At Alert Logic, we’ve seen a staggering 60% reduction in our AWS costs as a direct result of embracing container technology.

Challenges of Container Security

As with just about any technology, though, the benefits of containers come with a number of unique security concerns as well. For example:

• Inability to detect threats in real-time: Organizations lack the ability to detect intrusions in containerized environments due to outdated, non-native detection systems. Legacy IDS tools fail to capture and analyze container activity in real time, leaving critical security gaps.
• Invisible metadata changes: The absence of visibility into metadata changes makes it nearly impossible to identify and assess threats within containerized environments. Without this essential data, organizations are left blind when it comes to responding to security incidents effectively.
• Undetected Intruders and Persistent Threats: Without real-time monitoring, attackers can remain undetected within containers, deploying malicious payloads such as Trojans, cryptominers, and other forms of malware. This opens the door for data exfiltration, corruption, and long-term system compromise.

Alert Logic Network Intrusion Detection for Containers

Alert Logic offers the industry’s first network intrusion detection system (IDS) to protect container deployments, available in Alert Logic Cloud Defender and Threat Manager solutions. With Alert Logic’s intrusion detection for containers, within just a few minutes, you will see if exploits are targeting your containers. Plus, Alert Logic security experts are watching your environment 24×7 so you’re never on your own.

Alert Logic intrusion detection for containers improves AWS security for Cloud workloads with proactive notification of suspicious activity within your containers and detects cyberattacks in real-time by analyzing the signature of data packets as they traverse the container environment. You get greater visibility of the potential impact with a graphical representation of the compromised containers and their relationships, and informed advice and remediation guidance from Alert Logic’s security operations experts in our world-class Security Operations Center so you can quickly take the appropriate action.

“As Accesso continues to focus on our industry-leading technology and security infrastructure, we need to ensure our containerized environment is protected without introducing additional complexity,” said William DeMar, Director, Information Security, accesso. “With Alert Logic, we have extended IDS security monitoring and detection to the container level and have gained more granular visibility into our container environments across multiple cloud platforms. Alert Logic partnered with us to get up and running quickly, and their team of security analysts and consultants proactively escalates incidents so we can prioritize our team’s efforts.”

You can’t afford to not run containers, but even more crucially, you can’t afford to run containers that aren’t secure. Learn more about Alert Logic’s container security solutions.