Ensuring unbreakable and impenetrable security for any IT systems and business services has been one of the prime needs and the predominant challenges in the IT field for decades now. Brilliant minds can identify and exploit all kinds of security holes and flaws (some of them are being carelessly and unknowingly introduced at the system conceptualization and concretization stages). This loophole ultimately brings innumerable breaches and chaos during IT service delivery. Sometimes, systems are even becoming unavailable for consumers and clients.
Security experts and engineers, on the other hand, try out every kind of trick and technique at their disposal in order to stop hackers in their evil journey. However, it has not been an outright victory so far. Here and there, there are some noteworthy intrusions from unknown sources resulting in highly disconcerting IT slowdowns and sometimes breakdowns. Organizations and governments across the globe are, therefore, investing heavily their talents, time, and treasures in security research endeavors in order to completely decimate all the security and safety-related incidents and accidents. There are many security-specific product vendors and managed security service providers aiming to minimize the irreparable and indescribable consequences of security threats and vulnerabilities on IT systems. Precisely speaking, for any existing and emerging technology, security has been the most crucial and critical aspect. The point to be noted here is that enterprise and cloud IT teams can't be carefree and complacent in fulfilling the security needs.
Docker-enabled containerization represents the next logical step on the memorable and indomitable journey from physical, underutilized, closed, monolithic, and single-tenanted IT resources to supple, open, affordable, automated, shared, service-oriented, optimally utilized, and virtual IT resources. Precisely speaking, we are tending toward software-defined and containerized cloud environments in order to reap a bunch of widely articulated business, technical, and user benefits. As accentuated several times in this book, Docker containers typically comprise a filesystem, network stack, process space, and everything else needed to run an application anywhere. This means that each Docker container includes the designated application and all its dependencies to be shipped, hosted, and executed in an independent manner. This widely celebrated abstraction, however, is prone to fresh and advanced security attacks, vulnerabilities, and holes. Systems can be made inaccessible, datasets can be breached, services can be stopped, and so on.
Precisely speaking, the raging Docker technology promises to drastically transform the way worldwide enterprises develop, deploy, and manage critical software applications. However, containers are no panacea. The same challenges we face while deploying and delivering an application on hybrid IT environments get replicated in containers. This chapter pinpoints the proven approaches for mitigating the containerization-induced and inspired security issues. As cloud environments are extensively containerized, the unbreakable and impenetrable containers ultimately vouch for safe, secure, and smart cloud centers. The long-term goal is to have many robust, resilient, and rewarding containers in publicly discoverable locations. There are undoubtedly pioneering tools and platforms to compose better and bigger containers out of those customizable, configurable, and compact containers through commingling and collaboration.