Dynatrace KSPM: Transforming Kubernetes security and compliance

We are excited to announce that Dynatrace has introduced new capabilities for Kubernetes security posture management through a new capability in the Dynatrace SPM app. This solution provides continuous assessment of adherence to technical standards, visibility, prioritization, and remediation for misconfigurations and compliance findings across Kubernetes environments.

Why manual audits and custom scripts fall short for Kubernetes security posture management

In the dynamic and complex world of Kubernetes, relying on manual audits, custom scripts, and general-purpose security tools is no longer enough to achieve efficient security posture management. Here’s why:

• Misconfigurations are pervasive. Permissions, workload security, and container configurations are notoriously difficult to manage in Kubernetes environments, leading to vulnerabilities.
• Compliance auditing is a challenge. Kubernetes’s ephemeral nature and limited logging make compliance auditing a nightmare. Non-compliance and misconfigurations thrive in scalable clusters without continuous reporting.
• There is a high likelihood of uncontrolled attack surfaces. Blind spots in security expose organizations to significant risks as attack surfaces grow unchecked.
• Processes are time-intensive. Custom scripts and manual workflows demand substantial time and effort, creating inefficiencies.
• Reactivity. Manual approaches lack continuous monitoring, making them ill-equipped to prevent issues before they arise.
• The skills gap creates inefficiencies. Kubernetes expertise is in high demand but short supply, leaving many teams underprepared to manage security effectively.
• Slow processes introduce risk. Security and compliance slowdowns not only create inefficiencies but also pose direct risks to business operations.

As regulatory compliance requirements grow increasingly complex, manual and ad-hoc methods exacerbate delays and elevate risks. The time has come to move beyond outdated practices and adopt solutions designed for the realities of Kubernetes environments.

Dynatrace brings a smarter approach to Kubernetes security posture management

Amid the challenges posed by Kubernetes environments, visibility into every aspect of its configuration and the ability to prioritize remediation actions for security-relevant misconfigured resources creates the basis for good security hygiene and exposure risk reduction.

Continuous visibility and assessment provide platform engineering, DevSecOps, DevOps, and SRE teams with the ability to track, validate, and remediate potential compliance-relevant findings and create the necessary evidence for the auditing process.

By extending the rich Kubernetes observability data with security and compliance-relevant assessments against technical best practices and standards for regulatory compliance (such as NIST, DORA, CIS, DISA STIG, and more), Dynatrace brings all relevant findings together and creates a holistic and intuitive way to prioritize, remediate and report on security posture relevant findings for practitioners, saving valuable time and resources.

Key benefits of Dynatrace KSPM

With Dynatrace KSPM, teams can ensure robust security posture management across development, staging, and production environments while maintaining audit readiness and enabling cross-functional teamwork. Here’s how these capabilities come together in Dynatrace platform to transform Kubernetes security and compliance:

Automated security assessments

Security best practices and benchmarks can be automatically assessed, providing valuable insights into the overall configuration security. From dev to staging and production environments, the Dynatrace platform ensures visibility across all teams involved.

Continuous compliance assessments

Continuous compliance assessments allow for better audit readiness without the need for time-intensive manual assessment tracking. This capability enables the assessment, reporting, and remediation of compliance-relevant findings across Kubernetes clusters.

Enhanced collaboration with Grail

With the power of Grail, teams can extend the value of their security posture management findings via Dynatrace Notebooks, Dashboards, or Workflows. Grail allows for collaboration and remediation actions across multiple teams.

Comprehensive Kubernetes security in one platform

Dynatrace offers K8s teams a unified platform for all Kubernetes security and observability needs. It provides complete visibility into the entire Kubernetes stack, identifying runtime vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and security risks, along with their potential impact and no false positives. DevSecOps teams can integrate security gates into release processes to prevent the deployment of code or containers with vulnerabilities or compliance issues at runtime. This empowers teams to efficiently deliver secure, compliant Kubernetes applications by design.