Cloud-native application protection platform startup Tigera Inc. today announced new capabilities that help reduce an application’s attack surface.

The new features include security policy recommendations for namespaces, Federal Information Processing Standards compliance for use by federal agencies, and improved dashboards for faster troubleshooting.

Tigera argues that policy development requires an advanced understanding of microservices that interact with and depend on each other — those with vulnerabilities, those that need to communicate outside the cluster and those that are accessing sensitive data. With the new release of Tigera’s Security Policy Recommender, organizations that lack the expertise to build granular policies can avoid outages and vulnerabilities during policy development, the company says.

The latest iteration of the Security Policy Recommender suggests policies at the namespace level in addition to policies at the pod level. Users interested in multitenant architectures and workload isolation can use the enhanced service to implement microsegmentation without detailed knowledge of application-level changes.

The update is said to increase team productivity by enabling users – no matter their expertise – to take advantage of automated policies to improve the security posture of their Kubernetes clusters.

The latest Tigera Calico update also enables users to become FIPS-compliant, a standard required to work with federal agencies. To satisfy compliance requirements and make the platform accessible to more users, Calico now offers a FIPS-compliant installation and deployment mode to allow customers to meet FedRAMP requirements when using Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Managed Kubernetes Service or similar platforms for managed Kubernetes services.

“Instead of building a tool for the largest share of the market, our team is constantly iterating to ensure the platform is accessible, useful and responsive to everyone from small teams to large enterprises,” Amit Gupta, chief product officer of Tigera, said in a statement. “Security and compliance are critical considerations for organizations and we look forward to seeing our customers put these new capabilities to use in pursuit of more resilient and compliant architectures.”

Tigera is a venture capital-backed startup that has raised $53 million in funding, including a round of $30 million in 2018. Investors in the company include Insight Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, New Enterprise Associates and Wing VC.

Photo: Tigera