With containerization technologies are rapidly gaining popularity as a lightweight, scalable alternative to virtual machines, enterprises look to migrate workloads. In this shift towards containers, the demand for a security system that can underpin the transition and its new processes continues to expand.

Amazon Web Services Inc. partner and cloud application infrastructure security company CloudPassage Inc. is working to fill that need with its latest service, CloudPassage Halo Container Secure.

“Customers … have been using us to secure their workloads. … [And] what they’re really looking for is one single platform that helps them secure and be compliant across the board. The next step in the direction of that evolution is to have support for containers,” said Alok Ojha (pictured), senior director of products for container security at CloudPassage.

With Container Secure, CloudPassage expanded its support efforts beyond servers, bare metal and virtual machines to include the container platforms so many enterprises need secured.

Ojha spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed CloudPassage’s expansion into the world of container support. (* Disclosure below.)

Shoring up container security risks

While container use has gained popularity through its ease of deployment, the platform provides some security risks through the potential instability of Docker as a host operating system or vulnerable packages in application images, according to Ojha.

When CloudPassage customers expressed a need for more simplified method to managing host, virtual machines and containers all-in-one, the company considered the range of security issues containers could face before developing its single platform solution.

“Docker has inherent security; it’s not still good enough. … You have to look at the third pillar, which is the Docker host on which the container is running, because containers are only as secure as the underlying operating system,” Ojha said.

Through Container Secure, CloudPassage is working to address all potential underlying security issues, as well as the customer concerns around secure development processes and compliance. “Security and compliance as a problem are still the same, but how people are building and delivering software, where they’re doing it, what infrastructure they’re actually running on, adds to complexity … [and] scalability problems,” Ojha said.

CloudPassage’s status as an AWS partner will allow for great innovation driven by the rapid growth of the Amazon ecosystem, according to Ojha. “The use of infrastructure is going to speed up. … Our customers are going to be requiring means to secure and be compliant with various regulations as they’re deploying their software and containerizing different applications,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: CloudPassage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CloudPassage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE