6 Serverless and Containerization Trends CISOs Should Track

Cloud deployments are not only growing in complexity, but they are way more integral to the delivery of business-critical technology – so much so that they make early cybersecurity challenges from software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps seem quaint in comparison. As developers, testers, and operations staff speed along with continuous delivery/continuous integration (CI/CD) efforts, the use of containers and serverless technology is skyrocketing. With it brings plenty of new impending security issues.

"Serverless computing, often called 'function as a service,' will create massive security headaches in 2019, especially when it comes to identifying and protecting assets," predicts Bob Huber, chief security officer at Tenable. "While serverless computing is a great way to reduce the burden of infrastructure management on developers, it also creates a lack of ownership and visibility into environments."

The same goes for containers and containerization orchestration and automation tools like Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and Docker Swarm. And while some people have previously debated whether serverless technology would take over containerization momentum, the truth is they're actually complementary, says Rani Osnat, vice president of product marketing at Aqua Security.

"It's not even a two-horse race. There's a whole range of deployment modalities that include serverless functions, serverless containers – for example, AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances – containers, various hybrids like AWS Firecracker, or sandboxing technologies like Google gVisor and Kata Containers,” Osnat says. "We will see increasingly composite architectures that blend these mechanisms to optimize performance, scale, and cost."

With such rapid adoption and fast-changing technology, CISOs will need to stay on top of these trends to effectively manage the new risks they'll increasingly bring in the coming year.