Deploying Cloud Containers with Confidence: How to Keep Your Data Safe and Secure

Deploying cloud containers to keep your data safe and secure from cyber threats that may arise. 

The idea of having a containerized cloud is nothing new. It's been on the market for a while, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But have you ever wondered how it can be secured? Not just for your information but also for customers, partners, and employees?

In this post, we'll explore the different ways of securing containers from deployment to data storage. You'll learn how to keep your data safe and secure from cyber threats that may arise. We also discuss some best practices on how to protect your customers' information as well as how to handle security vulnerabilities with patching.

Security Considerations

Let's take a look at the main cloud container security considerations that are important to look at when you are creating a containerized application:

Isolation

If you run a virtual machine (VM) in your cloud, you're running just one application. VMs are isolated and if you share one with anyone, it will not affect the other one.

Containers are very similar to VMs except that they are very lightweight. Containers are best used for hosting applications that are often written in very dynamic languages and designed to be deployable on a live system. This includes Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python, and PHP.

When you create a container in a VM, the container gets isolated and if you want to deploy it anywhere, you will have to separate it from your other applications. You may not have any worries about the network as you may just deploy it to a single server, but if you want to share it with others, you will have to deploy it to multiple servers.

Of course, running multiple containers in a VM may be a large undertaking, especially if your applications are very large. In order to isolate multiple containers, you will have to deploy the containers individually. This means you can have your application and another application running at the same time on a single host.

Deploying securely

So, how do we secure containers? Before we can do that, let's look at the different factors that are important to consider:

A very important consideration for securing containers is whether the cloud provider will enforce security measures. Many of them have their own products and tools, so it's important to check out what they have to offer before you start deploying your container.

Cloud providers are very important in securing containers. They can do an analysis on what your application requires and will take a proper security approach to securing it. They will do a good job at enforcing security measures by having their own applications in the cloud.

Some of them have a good security monitoring and management solution that can help you to track any misconfiguration or breaches of your containers. This will help you to come up with remediation strategies if there is any breach.

Once the containers are deployed, you have to monitor them for security and configuration problems.

Data Storage

When we think about how to move data around, people usually think about virtual machines or a file system. While this is an important factor to look at, it's not the only one. One very important consideration is what is the place of the container data: either in the container itself or within the cluster (the group of containers that are running). This could be an issue if you don't know where your data is going to be stored.

Data storage is one of the most important factors to consider when securing containers.

With virtual machines, your data is placed in a location that is isolated from the host system. On the other hand, with containers, you might have several container instances, so your data is potentially inside several containers, and depending on the data model you chose, it is safe for you to store it on the host or in a more isolated location.

When you create a new container, the cloud provider can see what type of data is inside it. This means if you run your application in an insecure way, then your data could be compromised. However, if you are running the application in a way that makes it secure to the cloud provider, then your container data is not stored anywhere and it is safe.

Define Security Rules

As we have discussed above, this is one of the most important considerations for security when you deploy containers. When you are implementing security, it is very important to define the security rules, and those rules should reflect your application requirements and data model.

Here are some examples of the security rules that should be defined:

It is very important to define the storage rule that is governing the container storage and what container is allowed to access the storage (called the container's data access control list (CACL)). This rule should be clearly defined in the definition of the container.

Depending on the requirements of your container and application, you can do this through the use of a process manager. You can set this process manager to be the container's owner to grant access to write the data and read it from the storage.

If you have other security rules that need to be defined, such as access control lists (ACLs) or role-based access control lists (RBACLs), you can leverage the process manager as the container's owner to enforce the access rules and identity administration.