Container security startup Capsule8 is moving forward with beta customer deployments and a Series A round of funding, to help achieve its vision of providing a secure, production-grade approach to container security.
The Series A round of funding was announced on Sept. 19, with the company raising $6 million, led by Bessemer and ClearSky, bringing total funding to date up to $8.5 million. Capsule8 first emerged from stealth in February 2017, though its’ core technology product still remains in private beta as the company fine-tunes the platform for production workload requirements.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Dino Dai Zovi, co-founder and CTO of Capsule8 said that most organizations first consider stability and performance in any application, before looking at security.
The market for container security technologies is an increasingly crowded space with multiple vendors including Twistlock, Aqua Security and StackRox all aiming for a share of enterprise security budgets. Dai Zovi said that Capsule8 differentiates itself with its real-time, machine learning augmented approach to container security.
“In order to have a resilient infrastructure with an automatic response to security incidents, latency is incredibly important,” Dai Zovi said. “So having low-latency from attack to response is critical.”
From a machine-learning perspective, Capsule8 is not using some of the standard components other vendors tend to use such as Apache Hadoop, Kafka, Spark or Elasticsearch. Rather, Dai Zovi said that instead of using a Big Data approach, Capsule8 is looking for the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’ to identify risky container behavior.
Dai Zovi is well known in the security community for discovering and reporting multiple security vulnerabilities over his nearly two-decades working in the security business. That said, at this point in the container orchestration and deployment market, Dai Zovi doesn’t see the need to look for exploits in container technology. In his view, many container orchestration platform technologies currently are not mature enough to require attackers to have a security vulnerability in hand to compromise a system.
“The security controls aren’t there, that you would need security vulnerabilities to get around,” Dai Zovi said.
Watch the full video interview with Dino Dai Zovi, co-founder and CTO of Capsule8 above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.