Tigera launches platform to help cloud-native orgs reduce their attack surface

Tigera has launched a pay-as-your-go cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) called Calico Cloud, built on the container networking and security solution Calico Open Source. 

The solution uses zero-trust principles to reduce organizations’ cloud attack surface while leveraging machine learning to detect both known and unknown threats in multicloud or hybrid cloud environments.  

This offers enterprises and decision-makers a solution they can use to secure cloud-native applications with image assurance, configuration management, and runtime threat defense — all of which have traditionally remained difficult to protect.

The cloud-native security challenge  

Tigera’s announcement comes as more organizations move to the cloud to enable employees to work from home, a trend that accelerated rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn’t appear to be slowing anytime soon. 

According to Gartner, in 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to the cloud, and will reach approximately $1.8 trillion in 2025. As this investment in the cloud increase, the need for cloud-native security solutions is growing rapidly, with a wave of new CNAPP platforms entering the market. 

“Today, every security company is a CNAPP company. Yet, the challenges in securing cloud-native applications remain unsolved. In a recent cloud-native application security survey by Snyk, nearly 60% said that they had increased security concerns since adopting cloud native applications,” said Ratan Tiperneni, president and CEO of Tigera. 

“While CNAPPS get better at detecting vulnerabilities and zero-day threats, the security teams are under intensifying pressure to mitigate risks from exposure and remediate issues,” he said. 

“The Tigera CNAPP, Calico Cloud, takes an active approach to security by bringing zero-trust principles to reduce the application’s attack surface, harnessing machine learning to combat runtime security risks from known and zero-day threats, enabling continuous compliance, prioritizing and mitigating risks from vulnerabilities and attacks through security policy changes.”

Using open source to stand a cut above 

Calico Cloud is now one of many CNAPP providers competing in the fast-growing cloud security market, valued at $40.8 billion in 2021 and anticipated to reach $77.5 billion by 2026 as cybersecurity threats grow more complex and increase the demand for services and solutions from cloud security vendors. 

The market is extremely competitive, with one of the organization’s main competitors being Palo Alto Networks’s Prisma Cloud 3.0, a CNAPP solution that offers agent less and agent-based security.

The solution has a customer base of 77% of the Fortune 100, and reported 1,676 Prisma cloud customers last year as analysts expect total revenue to reach between $5.35 billion to $5.40 billion in 2022. 

Another competitor, Aqua Security, recently expanded its CNAPP to continuously discover cloud native assets, provides proactive workload scanning searches for vulnerabilities, and offer compound risk analysis into threats in the environment, while achieving a valuation of $1 billion last year. 

However, Tiperneni suggests that Tigera’s secret weapon in the CNAPP arms race is its history with Calico Open Source, which already powers more than 100 million containers and half a million clusters across 2 million nodes in 166 countries. 

“A lot of zero trust needs to be built on a strong foundation of networking, where we are an industry leader. We’ve leveraged this, along with lessons learned over the years, as a foundation to build out our zero trust capabilities. That, combined with the expansion of our already impressive threat detection and mitigation capabilities, led to the industry’s most comprehensive active CNAPP with full-stack observability for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud,” he said.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz