Cloud computing has quickly become integral to many organizations’ business operations. These organizations have utilized the cloud to drive digital transformation initiatives and improve operational efficiency and productivity rates, among other purposes. Their use of the cloud has also unlocked new technologies, among them, containers and Kubernetes (K8s), which this Radar will focus on.

Organizations increasingly utilize containers and K8s in the context of a strategic shift away from the traditional application development and delivery process that typically involves developers building, testing, and deploying applications as a single unit, better known as monolithic applications. In contrast, the modern application development and delivery process uses a microservices architecture that allows breaking down applications into smaller and independent services that can be deployed, developed, and scaled individually. Organizations favor this modern application development and delivery process because it enables them to release new features and fixes at a faster rate.

However, the introduction of containers and K8s entails a myriad of security challenges that previously did not exist in on- premises settings, bringing organizations into uncharted territory. These security challenges arise due to the dynamic and distributed nature of containers and K8s, which differs from the traditional and monolithic processes. Containers, in general, have a short lifespan, which makes enforcing consistent security policies difficult, while K8s introduce complexity in securing control planes and managing access controls. Their microservices architecture adds another layer of security challenges. In addition, there are cloud-specific or container-specific regulations that organizations need to comply with.

As containers and K8s integrate into business operations, organizations demand container/K8s security solutions to ensure that deployments are secure and compliant with regulatory standards. These solutions must include certain capabilities: automated container images and registry scanning, automated scanning for misconfigurations (which can, for example, identify vulnerabilities in container images at the early stage of application development, preventing the deployment of containers with security flaws into production environments), compliance checks and real-time monitoring, access controls and network policy implementation, and the detection of abnormal behaviors to prevent unauthorized access between containers and provide runtime protection to eliminate suspicious processes in real time.

While container/K8s security solutions are designed to mitigate security challenges, customers increasingly demand solutions integrated into a broader cloud security platform—a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). This is part of the market’s efforts to improve visibility into cloud environments, reduce the number of security solutions, and have a unified platform that consolidates critical cloud security capabilities.

Because of increasing container-specific attacks, organizations seek container/K8s security solutions equipped with risk prioritization to help identify and prioritize alerts. Runtime protection is highly sought after because it enables organizations to take a more proactive approach to protecting their critical applications without affecting their development and delivery process—which requires quickly deployed features to ensure that customers’ needs are continuously met.

In a field of more than 30 global container/K8s security industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted in this Frost Radar™ analysis the top 12 companies that excelled in growth and ability to drive visionary innovation in the past year.

Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to reveal their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™, considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.