Let's get our hands dirty with policy as code and write our first OPA policies for a Kubernetes environment.

Companies often see seasonal business spikes with periods of increased on-line demand or activity. To meet the changing application demands, Kubernetes has become the platform of choice to automatically scale web applications and infrastructure up and down. Autoscaling in Kubernetes adjusts the resources that are available to run the application or service, while minimizing the cost of those resources.

Controlling and filtering traffic when containerizing a workload within Kubernetes Pods is just as crucial as a firewall in a more traditional network setup. The difference is that, in this scenario, those capabilities are provided by the Kubernetes NetworkPolicy API. This article will explore Kubernetes NetworkPolicy by creating an example network policy and examining its core parameters. Then, we’ll look at some common NetworkPolicy use cases and learn how to monitor them using kubectl.

Sysdig is a premier Google Cloud Platform (GCP) partner and has been working with Google towards the common goal of supporting our customers and securing their cloud journey for the last seven years. Sysdig is focused on securing and monitoring workloads running on Google Cloud – including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Autopilot, Anthos, and more. All these various elements of GCP can be protected using Google Security Command Center. Learn more about how to enhance your GCP security.

CIS Benchmarks are a focused set of guidelines for the secure configuration, vulnerability detection, and threat remediation of distributed workloads. In this article, we compare the leading tools that scan against the CIS Kubernetes benchmark framework. Security frameworks help modern software organizations define their risk management processes and platform requirements to prevent cyber risks.

As the need for a new security strategy grows, we use cloud-native security platforms (CNSP). Cloud services like containers, serverless security, platform as a service (PaaS), and microservices are the building blocks of cloud-native architectures. Because these services are loosely coupled- that is, they are not hardwired to any infrastructure components developers can frequently make changes without harming other parts of the application or other team members’ projects.

Policy-based access management (PBAM) uses decoupled policy as code and a policy engine to provide real-time authorization decisions throughout the cloud-native ecosystem. This article presents an overview of policy-based access management, its benefits and implementation methods.

As AuthZ Becomes Mainstream, Policy as Code, Infrastructure as Code and Software Supply Chain Security Will Merge It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time for the greatest gift of all: next year’s predictions. Last year, we predicted that in 2022 security teams will embrace cloud-native tools to automate manual checks, that enterprises will increasingly shift on-prem resources into the cloud and that we’d see the emergence of a clear authorization market.

Enterprises cannot implement Zero Trust cybersecurity without real-time dynamic authorization and authentication for every access request. The principles of Zero Trust and Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices help fill the gaps that traditional cybersecurity systems often create and ignore.

Identity and access management (IAM) is an integral part of security systems. Without proper authentication and authorization, it would be impossible to practice cybersecurity principles such as zero trust and least privilege. By now, most organizations have a firm grasp on the identity part of IAM, including concepts like multi-factor and token-based authentication.