In a recent report, Accenture notes that “organizations are finding that they have hit a wall when it comes to delivering new kinds of value and innovation from their existing cloud strategies.” The report indicates that the “lift and shift” model—where organizations emulated old-world applications and architectures—is no longer sufficient for companies seeking to leverage the full value of the cloud.
Cloud-native Architectures on the Rise
Cloud-native applications offer various benefits to organizations over traditional applications running in the cloud. The value of cloud-native approaches typically falls into two different areas: greater business agility and faster development cycles. As organizations seek to tap the advantages of cloud native, the adoption of cloud-native components is rapidly growing. Forrester, for example, predicts that just a year from now, 30% of developers will regularly use cloud containers and 25% will use serverless computing. These numbers will likely only increase as the marketplace continues to rapidly evolve and enterprises frequently need to make high-impact changes to applications on a very short timeline.
Securing Cloud-native Applications
In order to realize the full benefits of cloud-native applications, organizations must ensure they have the right security technology and processes in place. With this in mind, Contrast Security recently acquired CloudEssence, a cloud-native security technology company, and established a Cloud Native Innovation Center in Israel. This is exciting news for Contrast customers, as the CloudEssence team will help accelerate development of cutting-edge, cloud-native security solutions that will be integrated into Contrast’s Application Security Platform, extending security observability to applications developed in cloud-native architectures.
Formation of the Cloud Native Innovation Center
The Cloud Native Innovation Center will be led by three former CloudEssence co-founders: Ram Yonish, vice president of Cloud Native and general manager for Israel; Tal Melamed, senior director of Cloud Native Research; and Itay Rozenman, senior director of Cloud Native Engineering. This leadership team will report into Steve Wilson, Contrast’s newly appointed chief product officer. They are actively recruiting and building a larger team of engineers who will work in the Cloud Native Innovation Center.
The CloudEssence team brings a wealth of experience and technological innovation to Contrast. The cutting-edge product built by the CloudEssence team will position Contrast as a continued leader in application security as it expands the footprint of its industry-unique platform that provides security observability across the entire application development life cycle, including cloud-native environments.
Scaling Application Security at the Speed and Agility of Cloud Native
Companies in all industries will inevitably adopt more containers, microservices, serverless architectures, and other cloud-native technologies in their development efforts in the next several years. Contrast customers using these technologies will soon have the confidence that comes from the Contrast Application Security Platform’s continuous analysis, real-time feedback, and runtime protection for their applications.
