Organizations across all industries are adopting containers for increased agility, developer productivity, and increased availability and performance.
To orchestrate and manage this dynamic, new environment of smaller micro-services, Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto standard.
More and more industries like the public sector, banking, fin-tech, RegTech, iGaming, MedTech, and biotech are all facing increased regulatory pressure due to their influence on society. Even companies not under industry regulations choose to adopt best practice controls like CIS or SOC2.
Handling sensitive user data and adhering to regulations like GDPR, ISO-27001 or PCI-DSS can be hard in a dynamic, container-based environment due to multiple levels of abstraction and virtualization, which are hard to translate to regulatory requirements written with physical infrastructure and single-tenancy in mind. As such, proving to security teams that containers can be as secure, if not more than traditional VMs have for the last few years been a challenge. Furthermore, with additional moving parts, attack surfaces increase.
If your current environment has passed all audits, DevOps teams must make the case for containerization even louder as the current setup, even though inflexible and causing a slower software development lifecycle, is proven compliant. Aspects such as network segmentation, firewalls, role-based access control, secret handling, vulnerability (antivirus) scanning, and updates are all done differently in containerized environments.
Although historically known as hard to set up, getting a Kubernetes cluster up and running today is a few clicks away. Operating it in production with real workloads while handling sensitive user data is still a major challenge though, especially under heavy security requirements or regulatory restrictions.
A process has started to connect Safespring’s cloud platform to Sjunet in Sweden.
In addition to monitoring the clusters 24/7 for both health metrics and suspicious external activity, operating a cluster also means doing constant platform lifecycle management - upgrading, testing, and patching when security vulnerabilities arrive. Keeping up to date with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), managing backups, and operating ancillary services like logging and monitoring also add to the work burden of your operations team.
In essence, the challenge is how to increase software agility through containerization while guaranteeing security and compliance for your business.
Safespring Compliant Kubernetes (CK8s) is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes distribution that comes prepackaged with security-hardened configurations and open source components according to best practices. Safespring provides quarterly releases of Compliant Kubernetes - testing and hardening the components, to make sure they adhere to the strict security and regulatory requirements our customers have for their container platforms.
Safespring Compute is the core of Compliant Kubernetes
Our infrastructure service is located in secure data centers within the EU and doesn't get affected by foreign laws like CLOUD Act or FISA 702.
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Compliant Kubernetes allows organizations to enjoy the full benefits of Kubernetes while fulfilling regulatory requirements, not only when deploying new clusters but over the whole software development life cycle - software development, composition, and packaging, testing and deployment, as well as operations and audits.
Due to Cloud Act and other forces that allow foreign entities to access user data, European companies are also more and more migrating their workloads to European providers.
Compliant Kubernetes is available as a managed service in partnership with Safespring, giving you all the benefits of a modern container platform running in Nordic data centers without you having to care about operations.
