Product Overview: Aqua Security
Aqua Security is a pioneering platform in the field of container and cloud-native security, founded in 2015 by a team of IT security veterans. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA, and Ramat Gan, IL, and is recognized for protecting over 500 of the world’s largest enterprises.
What Aqua Security Does
Aqua Security provides a comprehensive, full-lifecycle solution for securing containerized and cloud-native applications from development to production. The platform integrates security from code to cloud, ensuring that enterprises can leverage the benefits of containers and cloud-native technologies without increasing their risk profiles.
Key Features and Functionality
Image Scanning and Vulnerability Management
Aqua Security includes robust image scanning capabilities that check container images for vulnerabilities, malware, and misconfigurations before deployment. This is facilitated by tools like Trivy, Aqua’s open-source vulnerability scanner, which integrates into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure only secure images are used.
Runtime Protection
The platform offers real-time runtime protection, monitoring containerized applications and microservices to detect and respond to suspicious activities and potential security threats. This includes machine-learning based behavioral policies and the ability to block malicious activities.
Compliance Assurance
Aqua Security helps organizations ensure compliance with various security standards and industry regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR. It enforces security policies and compliance checks across the entire application lifecycle, providing real-time visibility and control over compliance posture.
Network Segmentation
The platform enforces network segmentation policies to control communication between containers and microservices, reducing the attack surface and preventing lateral movement of attackers.
CI/CD Pipeline Integration
Aqua Security seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines, automating security checks during image builds and deployments. This enables DevSecOps practices, ensuring security is embedded early in the development lifecycle without slowing down development pipelines.
Custom Security Policies and Microservices Security
Users can create custom security policies tailored to their organization’s specific security and compliance requirements. The platform also offers fine-grained security controls for individual microservices within containerized applications.
Serverless Security
Aqua Security extends its security capabilities to serverless functions, such as AWS Lambda, to protect event-driven serverless applications. It assesses the risk of serverless functions by discovering vulnerabilities and sensitive data in their code and environment variables.
Incident Response
In the event of a security incident, Aqua Security provides incident response capabilities to investigate, contain, and remediate threats within containerized environments.
Multi-Cloud and Multi-Environment Support
The platform supports deployments on various cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and IBM Cloud, as well as on-premises environments. It is interoperable with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker EE, Red Hat OpenShift, and more.
Architecture and Components
Aqua Security’s architecture includes several key components:
- Aqua Trivy Scanner: An open-source vulnerability scanner for container images.
- Aqua Enforcer: An agent deployed on each container host to enforce security policies and monitor running containers in real-time.
- Aqua Server: The central management component that orchestrates scans, enforces policies, and aggregates security data.
- Aqua Console: The user interface for managing and configuring security policies, viewing security findings, and responding to incidents.
Overall, Aqua Security’s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) combines the power of agent and agentless technology to provide a comprehensive security solution that protects cloud-native applications across their entire lifecycle, from code commit to runtime, without compromising development speed or enterprise scale.