Compliant Kubernetes

To orchestrate and manage this dynamic new landscape of smaller microservices, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard.

More and more industries—such as the public sector, banking, fintech, regtech, iGaming, medtech, and biotech—are facing increased regulatory pressure due to their influence on society. Even companies not subject to industry regulations choose to adopt best-practice controls such as CIS or SOC 2.

Handling sensitive user data and complying with regulations such as GDPR, ISO 27001, or PCI DSS can be difficult in a dynamic, container-based environment due to multiple layers of abstraction and virtualization, which are hard to map to regulatory requirements written with physical infrastructure and single tenancy in mind. As such, demonstrating to security teams that containers can be as secure as—or more secure than—traditional VMs has been a challenge in recent years. Furthermore, the additional moving parts increase the attack surface.

If your current environment has passed all audits, DevOps teams must make an even stronger case for containerization, since the current setup—though inflexible and slowing the software development lifecycle—is proven compliant. Elements such as network segmentation, firewalls, role-based access control, secret management, vulnerability (antivirus) scanning, and updates are all handled differently in containerized environments.

Although historically hard to set up, getting a Kubernetes cluster running today is basically a few clicks away. Operating it in production with real workloads and sensitive user data is still a major challenge, especially under strict security requirements or regulatory constraints.

Work is underway to connect Safespring’s cloud platform to Sjunet in Sweden.

In addition to monitoring clusters 24/7 for both health metrics and suspicious external activity, operating a cluster requires continuous platform lifecycle management—upgrading, testing, and patching when security vulnerabilities emerge. Staying current with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), managing backups, and running ancillary services such as logging and monitoring also add to your operations team’s workload.

In essence, the challenge is to increase software agility through containerization while guaranteeing your organization’s security and compliance.

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 aligned with best practices. Safespring provides quarterly releases of Compliant Kubernetes—testing and hardening the components to ensure they meet the strict security and regulatory requirements our customers have for their container platforms.

Compliant Kubernetes lets organizations realize the full benefits of Kubernetes while meeting regulatory requirements—not only when deploying new clusters, but throughout the entire software development lifecycle: development, composition and packaging, testing and deployment, and operations and audits.

Because of the CLOUD Act and other mechanisms that can allow foreign entities access to user data, European companies are increasingly 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 the operational overhead.