Tigera uses Azure capabilities to deliver active security for cloud-native apps

Tigera delivers active security for cloud-native apps

Developers are building applications of the future. Intelligent apps infused with AI provide advanced insights, incorporate open-source technologies, and use cloud-native tools that boost developer productivity and are inherently reliable and secure. DevOps and site reliability engineers (SREs) see significant operational advantages when they run core business processes on cloud-native applications. Building scalable, agile, and resilient applications in the cloud can get solutions to market faster and enable a company to better respond in an economic climate of uncertainty and disruption.

However, there is complexity in the cloud. While organizations build and deploy applications using cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and containers, they must protect containerized workloads, detect threats, and achieve continuous compliance. DevOps, SREs, and cloud architects within companies big and small require a resource-efficient and scalable advanced networking and security solution.

Security policy enforcement that reduces vulnerabilities

Tigera leads the charge with game-changing innovation to support the growing need for container and Kubernetes security. To ensure security of Kubernetes applications from external and internal threats, companies look to Tigera’s Calico Open-Source Solution, available in the Azure Marketplace. Its open-source offering is a widely adopted container networking and security solution and one of the top five solutions running on container-based technology¹. As the industry leader in container and Kubernetes security and observability, Tigera invented Calico, a networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico provides consistent enforcement of security policies, which enables DevOps, platform, and security teams to protect workloads by reducing surface attack with zero trust workload access controls, detect known and unknown threats, and mitigate risk automatically. Calico powers more than 100M containers across 2M+ nodes in 166 countries and is used by leading companies, including AT&T, Discover, Merck, ServiceNow, HansenMerkur, RealPage, L3Harris, and Mindbody. 

The power of a Microsoft partnership

With businesses across industries embracing Azure as the platform to deliver business-critical applications, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers the quickest way to start developing and deploying cloud-native apps with containers and Kubernetes. While Azure cloud technology is widely known as highly secure, modern, and scalable, enterprises struggle to safeguard communication between workloads in their Kubernetes clusters and external 3^rd-party application programming interfaces (API). That’s where Calico can supercharge AKS with zero-trust workload access controls.

“More and more enterprises choose AKS and the basic networking is fine. However, when application adoption increases over the time, they have to isolate each user of their application hosted on AKS. Complexity starts to arise with respect to security—it's about secure application isolation,” says Amit Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Tigera, whose team collaborates with the Azure team on the Calico OSS solution for Azure. “Calico makes sure that every service running within the application on AKS is talking to the internal resource or outside the AKS cluster to a defined service, a workload. Networking and security have to evolve—and that can happen with Calico.”

This innovation is one reason Microsoft named Tigera the Microsoft OSS on Azure Partner of the Year (2022) which recognizes the exceptional partner who excels in delivering outstanding open source-based applications or infrastructure solutions on the Azure platform. As an independent software vendor (ISV), Tigera works hand in hand with Microsoft to build, innovate, market, and sell the best solutions on Azure for any emerging customer demand.

Standing guard as you build, deploy, and run cloud-native apps in Azure

As enterprises standardize across Microsoft Azure, the impact of Tigera’s Calico solution for container networking and security is significant. Together, AKS and Calico keep communication between workloads secure, fast, and scalable through networking and security policy that handles connectivity between workloads and enforces security policies on those connections. Calico is the only technology to support native Windows, eBPF, and Linux containers. Calico OSS and AKS, AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server, and self-managed Kubernetes in Azure give customers active build, deploy, and runtime security through full-stack observability for securing, monitoring, and troubleshooting containers on Azure and AKS.

“Enterprises that adopt AKS for their containers and Kubernetes programs are primarily looking to do micro segmentation, workload access controls, and encryption. They need a security platform which can help them with that.” says Dhiraj Sehgal, Director Product and Solution Marketing at Tigera. “And specifically, when users run their production applications, this is critical because you can block any threat or vulnerability. From the run time perspective, when all these things are live and communicating and your business is running on it internally or externally, you don't want a scenario where a threat utilizes the vulnerability out there and brings down or stalls your application. In those type of scenarios, security controls are important and that's where Calico and AKS are a secure way to build and run cloud native applications.”

Future-ready cloud-native apps

From global enterprises to startups, running core business processes in cloud-native applications with Azure and Calico provide operational advantage like improved security and compliance, better performance, faster implementation times, and greater agility. Calico helps securely grow AKS deployments at scale and provide choice of data plane choice across standard Linux, Windows, and eBPF plus interoperability with non-Kubernetes workloads. Learn more about Tigera here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tigera 

¹ “10 Trends in Real-World Container Use,” Datadog Report, October 2021