How Illumio Closes Visibility Gaps in Container Environments

“Build once, run anywhere.” That’s what makes containers so great. With features like automation, cloud-based tools, and the ability to scale resources easily, containers have become a favorite for developers.

But containers have one big problem: lack of visibility.

Without granular visibility across the entire network, security teams may unintentionally leave gaps in container environments. These gaps have led to a major rise in container security breaches.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to get complete visibility across your network to secure containers as part of a consistent, end-to-end security architecture.

Containers will be breached

Containers are designed to be temporary. For a long time, people thought this made them automatically secure. The idea was that if something doesn’t last very long, it’s harder to hack into.

But malware like Siloscape, Hildegard, Kinsging, and cr8escape have figured out how to use containers to break into networks. To stop this, most container security tools focus on threat detection. They look for containers that have been compromised and remove any malware they discover.

Detecting threats is important. Unfortunately, these tools usually only focus on containers and don’t consider other resources outside the container cluster. This creates isolated systems with major blind spots which can make it harder and slower to respond to security breaches.

Apps running in a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster need to be accessed from outside the cluster. To fully protect containers, you need to see what’s happening both inside and outside the cluster and set consistent security policies across the whole system.

Containers are only as secure as your visibility

Containers are a DevOps dream, but they can be a nightmare for everyone else, especially when it comes to security.

DevOps teams like containers because they make app development faster. In container environments, DevOps manage the underlying infrastructure which automates the whole app process. This cuts down on manual work and avoids delays caused by other teams, like sysadmins, security, and networking.

DevOps teams know security is important, but they often leave it out of their initial automation workflows because they see it as slowing down development. When they do look for security tools, they usually pick ones that are only made for containers.

Why is this a problem? Tools designed just for containers focus on individual container resources. They collect data about how processes work and how resources are being used, but they don’t always give a clear view of how containers interact with each other.

These tools might show connections between pods, services, or namespaces. But there are often blind spots, such as:  

• Traffic between the nodes that run the Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster

• Traffic from those nodes to systems outside the cluster

• Outgoing traffic from workloads inside the cluster to workloads outside of it

Container-specific security tools might be able to see traffic moving from one namespace to another within a cluster. But what about traffic going from a namespace to an endpoint? Or from a namespace to a virtual machine (VM) or mainframe in a data center that isn’t using containers?

In simple terms, you can’t protect what you can’t see. If you don’t have visibility into your containers, you’re creating major blind spots in your network that attackers can exploit.

Get full visibility inside and outside of a cluster with Illumio

Illumio assumes that no matter how strong a container security solution is, it will never be 100%  perfect. Breaches are bound to happen.

Outside of containers, the Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) Platform provides complete visibility into how all hosts and applications connect. Illumio prevents breaches from spreading across your network, protecting all workloads even if a threat hasn’t been detected.  

This same protection is also applied to Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters.

Illumio discovers all traffic between all containers resources. It displays all traffic across the entire infrastructure, including containers, in one consistent view.

Illumio monitors allowed traffic between all resources, both inside and outside a cluster. It can spot unusual behavior and respond right away without needing to figure out what the threat is trying to do. This eliminates siloes across your entire network.  

3 ways Illumio provides container visibility

Illumio gives you three ways to see what’s happening both inside and outside Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters.

1. See all traffic to, from, and between underlying nodes

Illumio discovers all traffic between the underlying nodes and from those nodes to external workloads.

Containers clusters never exist on their own. They’re always hosted on an underlying host called a node. Nodes are the underlying VMs or bare-metal hosts where Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters run.  

Containers clusters are often treated like an island. All relevant behavior gets contained within that cluster and the outside world is an afterthought. This can cause problems when a breach happens or visibility is missing.

Security tools built for Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters often have little or no insight into the behavior and traffic between the underlying nodes or connections from the nodes to other resources outside the cluster.

Illumio solves this by removing these blind spots, giving you visibility into everything happening both inside and outside the cluster.

2. See egress traffic from pods out to external servers

Illumio enables visibility into egress traffic, including network behavior from resources inside of a cluster to workloads outside of it.

Security tools made for Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters often lack insight into non-container resources, like those in cloud environments, data centers, or on endpoints.

Illumio provides visibility across all three environments. For example, it can track traffic from an endpoint to a data center and then into a namespace within a Kubernetes cluster.

With Illumio, you gain visibility across your entire system. This helps you create consistent, metadata-driven security policies for every environment.

3. See communication between clusters

Illumio provides visibility into how Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters communicate with each other.

Containers clusters all share one thing in common: They grow quickly. As one cluster expands with more resources, new clusters are often created to spread resources across multiple clusters and improve efficiency.

When clusters grow, you need a container security solution that can detect and control traffic between clusters while maintaining visibility, no matter how large the system gets. Illumio makes it possible to see traffic between clusters and between clusters and workloads outside of them.

Illumio doesn’t necessarily replace container-specific security tools. For example, if a service mesh is used inside a cluster, Illumio focuses on monitoring and controlling dependencies outside the cluster, the nodes hosting the cluster, and traffic between the cluster and external workloads.

Illumio works alongside container-specific security solutions to provide full visibility across all resources that host and access container workloads. It gives you end-to-end protection.

Illumio completes Zero Trust for containers

Security risks aren’t just outside your containers — they’re inside too. To keep your network safe, you need to see and manage threats inside container clusters, just like you do for legacy workloads.

Illumio helps you see and enforce all traffic behavior between all workloads across the entire infrastructure, including containers. This eliminates visibility islands and stops inevitable breaches from spreading through your network.

Contact us today to learn more about getting visibility into your containers with Illumio.