DEVOPSdigest

Alcide announced that the Alcide Kubernetes Security Platform now supports compliance scans for PCI and GDPR, enabling DevOps to deliver regulatory compliance checks rapidly and seamlessly alongside Alcide’s leading Kubernetes security capabilities.

Gartner predicts that distributed cloud solutions will be a strategic technology trend in 2020. As such, companies will need tools that are purpose built to solve security and compliance challenges such as the Alcide Kubernetes Security platform. The Alcide Security Platform made headlines last summer when it was used to discover that 89% of Kubernetes deployments were not leveraging critical security resources within K8s. The radical new architecture of cloud native software and the novel operating environment of Kubernetes is leaving DevOps teams struggling to provide data security. This gap in security extends to regulatory compliance for security and privacy, a responsibility now partially shared by DevOps: in a report by Verizon on payment security, about 54% of companies in Europe and 61% of companies in America fail to comply with PCI DSS.

“Our findings on how companies are predominantly not using Kubernetes Secrets resources showed us how much DevOps needs automated systems to identify security and compliance risks. Building regulatory compliance scanning checks into Alcide Security Platform is a natural next step for Alcide” says Amir Ofek, CEO of Alcide. “The Kubernetes community is facing a shortage of skilled developers and security professionals, and Alcide is stepping up to meet the need for tools that enable DevOps and SecOps to maintain automated security and compliance at scale.”

Privacy and security compliance takes on many forms and exists in many verticals. PCIDSS emphasizes protection of payment card and transaction data, while GDPR seeks to protect the personal information of EU citizens doing business anywhere in the world. Cloud Native applications are particularly challenging when seeking compliance with these regulations, since standards such as PCI were not written with containers and Kubernetes workloads in mind. Developers must find analogous architectures such as defining whether a server definition in PCI is more like a pod, a node, or a cluster. Auditors are still catching up with cloud native technology and architecture, which further complicates the compliance process.

To address these challenges, Alcide has turned their Alcide Security Platform toward compliance scans for PCI and GDPR. Today’s announcement brings easy-to-implement compliance checks to users of the Alcide security tool to DevOps team. For example, installing and maintaining a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data, or to prohibit direct public access between the Internet and any system component in the cardholder data environment.