News

AWS Outposts Cert Comes to Kubernetes Security Firm Alcide

• By John K. Waters
• 09/17/2020

Israel-based Alcide this week announced it has achieved the AWS Outposts Ready designation, indicating that the Kubernetes security solutions provider has demonstrated successful integration with AWS Outposts deployments.

AWS Outposts is a managed service that lets organizations run their AWS solutions on-premises, enabling "a truly consistent hybrid experience." The service extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space or on-premises facility. The AWS Outposts Ready designation is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Ready Program.

Being deemed Outposts-ready is a big deal for Alcide, whose platform comprises three main modules: Advisor, kAudit and Runtime. Advisor is a Kubernetes multi-cluster vulnerability scanner that covers rich Kubernetes and Istio security best practices and compliance checks. kAudit automatically identifies anomalous behavior and suspicious activity based on the Kubernetes audit log. It also allows defining custom rules and alerts when certain Kubernetes actions occur. RunTime (ART) protects the container network with a microservices firewall and a threat detection engine. It also tracks processes running in containers themselves.

"We know the importance of helping customers and organizations more easily identify potential security risks in order to take action," said Joshua Burgin, general manager for the AWS Outposts group, in a statement. "With Alcide Advisor and Alcide ART available to customers on AWS Outposts, we are able to provide a comprehensive view of (a customer's) security posture on their infrastructure, on AWS Outposts, and in AWS Regions, both on premises and in the cloud, for a truly consistent hybrid experience."

I had an opportunity to talk with Gadi Naor, Alcide's CTO and co-founder, earlier this year at the beta launch of the company's sKan, a solution designed to provide "end-to-end continuous security guardrails" for Kubernetes deployments.

"We keep hearing from our customers that they want to bring Kubernetes security insights to developers early on," Naor told me at the time. "sKan stretches our main security platform into the comfort zone of the developers who are building applications running on Kubernetes in the most automated and seamless manner, without interrupting their development workflow."