Cybersecurity company Rapid7 recently acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50M. According to Crunchbase data, Alcide has recently raised ~$12M.
Alcide’s technology is designed to improve Kubernetes security. In this article, we’ll look at Alcide’s technology and how it can be used to improve Kubernetes security.
Overview of Rapid7’s acquisition of Alcide
Rapid7 recently acquired Alcide, an enterprise Kubernetes security leader, to expand our expertise in helping customers better identify and secure their fragmented exposure surface area across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. With this acquisition, Rapid7 has firmly established our position as providers of world-class cloud native infrastructure and application security solutions.
Alcide provides an extensive set of technology solutions that simplify the detection and remediation of misconfigurations in cloud native technology stacks such as Kubernetes, Istio and other container platforms. From continuous vulnerability assessment to automated compliance validation, Alcide enables organisations to secure their deployments against known and unknown exposures with minimal overhead or effort required from operations teams. It also helps ensure that organisations can maintain numerous regulatory standards like PCI DSS, SOC 2 and HIPAA to proceed confidently when deploying cloud native applications into production environments.
With the combination of Rapid7’s insight for exposure prioritisation plus Alcide’s expertise for resource integrity assurance throughout the deployment life cycle, customers will be equipped with a powerful means to securely manage their assets across many cloud environments — whether they are developing applications on Google Cloud Platform or premises — simply and confidently.
Overview of Alcide’s technology
Alcide’s technology provides comprehensive and secure cloud-native security for Kubernetes clusters, helping organisations protect their applications. In addition, the product is designed to enable DevOps teams to manage multiple instances of Kubernetes environments, from development and staging to production.
The technology provides several tools that help manage the complete lifecycle of resources such as images, objects, containers and more in Kubernetes environments. In addition, alcide integration with AWS tooling automates monitoring of user-defined canonical K8s configurations and validates external access compliance across nodes & services, even in complex topologies.
Alcide natively contains advanced techniques such as heuristics and machine learning algorithms that continuously observe behaviour to detect misconfigurations, anomalies, malicious attempts, or insider threats before they get out of hand. As a result, organisations can gain visibility on the activity at every layer within Kubernetes clusters – helping users eliminate blind spots for better security.
Alcide supports out-of-the-box policies for different types of users accessing applications or data within an organisation’s cluster environment, such as external administrators and internal teams. This helps boost compliance with organisational policies within an organisation’s cluster infrastructure or when utilising cloud instances, providing greater control over traffic visibility and dynamic segmentation mechanisms when necessary.
Cybersecurity company Rapid7 acquires Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50M; Alcide had raised ~$12M to date according to Crunchbase data (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)
Cybersecurity company Rapid7 has recently acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50M. Alcide has raised around $12M to date according to Crunchbase data.
With this move, Rapid7 will benefit from Alcide’s technology, which can provide increased Kubernetes security.
Let’s explore what Alcide’s technology can do for Kubernetes security.
Kubernetes security posture assessment
A Kubernetes security posture assessment assesses the limitations and vulnerabilities within a company’s current Kubernetes infrastructure. Alcide provides a comprehensive view into the security posture of each Kubernetes cluster, with real-time visibility and control over multiple aspects of the environment, from image scanning and CI/CD to compliance standards and runtime policies.
Alcide’s Kubernetes Security Posture Assessments include hardening checks, along with recommendations for further securing and controlling your clusters, such as:
-Testing all components of your Kubernetes cluster configuration -Identifying out-dated components or vulnerable releases -Ensuring security best practices have been implemented correctly in your environment -Validating that any custom namespaces or resources are secure by design -Comparing existing policy definitions against industry frameworks such as CIS or NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology) -Enforcing appropriate permission levels for users and network resources -Detecting malicious locations, ports or services running in production environments.
Alcide’s analysis allows you to easily identify where improvements must be made to strengthen your overall security posture. This knowledge can be used to help ensure compliance with applicable regulations, as well as reduce the potential for costly data breaches.
Kubernetes configuration auditing
Alcide’s Kubernetes configuration auditing technology provides actionable insights and real-time visibility into your Kubernetes clusters and nodes. It automatically scans the clusters for security violations, unapproved changes, and misconfigurations before they can threaten the availability or safety of your organisation.
Using runtime system information, logs and events from your clusters, Alcide shows you how to apply best practices to strengthen their defence against attacks. It leverages proprietary algorithms to analyse the environment and detect anomalies to uncover security risks that would otherwise remain hidden. The alerts can then be all sent at once via email or SMS for easy monitoring and investigation.
Alcide also uses Kubernetes API resources to detect malicious activity such as software downloaded from untrusted sources. Its strategic scanning methodology reduces resource utilisation while providing a complete overview of each node in your cluster. Hence, you have full visibility into the computer infrastructure running on it. In addition, Alcide’s open API allows you to integrate with existing security solutions or even custom ones developed in-house, thereby enabling tight integration across multiple cloud providers.
Kubernetes runtime security
Alcide’s Kubernetes runtime security solution provides an unparalleled defence against malicious threats, ensuring a secure and efficient environment when running and managing Kubernetes clusters.
Once installed, Alcide’s technology continuously scans the cluster’s workloads to detect misconfigurations that could compromise issues or compromise the cluster’s integrity. It also monitors user interaction with the Kubernetes API server, alerting whenever an unauthorised API call is made. This can help spot suspicious activity such as attempts to access sensitive data or misuse privileges.
Furthermore, Alcide proactively monitors containers and pod images to detect malicious activity that could harm the infrastructure and workloads on a cluster. With granular controls for precise privilege policies and detailed auditing capabilities, effective security practices are enforced throughout your organisation for stronger defence against potential threats.
Benefits of Alcide’s Technology
After the acquisition of Alcide, the cybersecurity company Rapid7 has benefited from Alcide’s innovative technology. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology from Alcide, Rapid7 can now offer unparalleled protection for Kubernetes-based applications.
In this article, we will explore the many advantages of Alcide’s technology.
Automation of security processes
Alcide’s comprehensive platform for Kubernetes security provides a unique approach to automate security processes and improve efficiency. Using rules, data import, alerts, and automation capabilities, Alcide can dramatically reduce the overhead needed to maintain secure Kubernetes environments. In addition, automations are highly customizable and extendable to allow for custom settings for any use case.
Alcide automates security checks within your cluster environment with continuous granular auditing and compliance. It also monitors configuration changes and verifies policy adherence from a holistic view of the infrastructure. By automatically detecting anomalies, misconfigurations, or any other issues that may be detected or breached policies, Alcide can potentially avoid many security risks before they cause damage or become problematic.
Alcide also allows you to manage multiple monitoring settings across different Kubernetes clusters with consolidated reporting capabilities that include visibility insights into all components within your distributed system. This feature helps ensure compliance over a cluster-level policy without sacrificing control over applications deployed inside each node. In addition, automated security scanning of CI/CD pipelines detects issues even before they reach the production stage, saving time and resources while ensuring the highest levels of application security.
In addition to checking the nodes themselves, Alcide’s platform offers extensive management of credentials including integration with IAM services such as AWS IAM and service accounts monitoring at both node-level and namespace-level granularity for more advanced setups such as multi-tenant environments on large clusters. This feature allows controlling what users can access which information at every layer which helps protect data from being misused or abused by malicious actors or mistakes caused by careless administration practices.
Improved visibility and control
Alcide’s technology offers users enhanced visibility and control to manage their containerized applications. This includes extensive visibility and control over container traffic, K8s resources, endpoints, namespaces, clusters and more. In addition, unlike traditional network security solutions that work on the assumption that all traffic is good traffic, Alcide’s cloud-native technology filters communications first—at Kubernetes API level—before sending container traffic over the wire for deeper inspection by security operations teams.
This preemptive approach enhances safety in Kubernetes environments by providing a better view into how workloads communicate. With improved visibility, users can gain deeper insights into user activity at startup levels to detect any irregularities or threats:
- Malicious processes running behind containers
- Lateral movement from compromised workloads to vulnerable ones
- Anomalies like suspiciously long lived cluster activity
Alcide’s technology also allows for improved control over communication pathways and security policies that enforce secure microservices-based architectures across any Kubernetes infrastructure. For example, with all interactions captured via a centralised toolkit users gain full insight into “who talks to who” and can easily create compliance rules between clusters or even individual containers to restrict data flow between containers or services based on who needs access to them—all while storing audit trails of resource activities in real-time.
Comprehensive security coverage
Alcide’s technology provides comprehensive security coverage for various Kubernetes infrastructure configurations. In addition, Alcide’s platform monitors and evaluates both static and dynamic aspects of Kubernetes clusters and workloads, providing both real-time and historical information. This data provides a comprehensive view of your system, enabling faster incident response, better security coverage and more reliable compliance reporting.
Alcide offers granular visibility on all your running clusters while helping you maintain secure environment configurations within each cluster. In addition, Alcide provides real-time alerts on anomalies so users can be proactively alerted of suspicious activity or misconfigurations that could lead to security breaches. The platform also effectively helps in the selective enforcement of policies by targeting only specific areas of the cluster that require more hands-on control, thereby reducing the number of resources needed to manage such an environment.
Furthermore, Alcide’s advanced risk profiling feature helps users identify high-risk clusters that require additional security considerations to keep them secure. The platform then enforces local user privileges and audit logging capabilities to the targeted clusters for further protection measures which can be used for forensic purposes. This data is then studied for insights about the system, leading to better optimization strategies, identifying inefficient practices to reduce cost and increase efficiency in running environments.
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