Illumio brings security to the Docker Mesosphere ecosystem
Illumio, a Silicon Valley Unicorn announced that its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP)TM will now work with Docker in the Mesosphere Data Center OS (DCOS). This integration brings a new level of security to Docker/Mesosphere production environments.
I had a chance to speak with Alan Cohen, chief commercial officer of Illumio and PJ Kirner, founder and CTO of Illumio. According to Cohen and Kirner the driving force behind integrating into the Docker Mesosphere environment was customer requests. This is the overriding determining factor for much of Illumio’s direction according to Cohen and Kirner.
Kirner said this about the integration:
“Docker and Mesosphere are giving organizations new abilities to more rapidly deploy applications and operate applications in micro-services architectures,” said PJ Kirner, CTO, Illumio. “With Illumio, security is no longer handcuffed to the network or hypervisor; it is free to move with any type of workloads anywhere they reside—inside containers, bare metal or VMs—to continuously keep the data center and cloud secure. By enabling continuous security at DevOps speed, organizations can have both fine-grained controls of their computing and security.”
It also explains why Illumio choose to work with Mesosphere instead of the perhaps sexier Kubernetes platform. The fact is Illumio had customers who had production environments running Docker/Mesosphere. The same was not necessarily true for Kubernetes/Docker. That is not to say that Illumio won’t eventually support the Google spawned container management solution. But it will have to wait until Illumio customers have that in their production environments.
From a market analyst point of view, this was interesting information. While Kubernetes has gotten plenty of press and buzz, it would seem that Mesosphere is out picking up the production environment engagements.
At this point everyone acknowledges how important security is to the success of containers. Illumio making a commitment to bring its adaptive security solution to this ecosystem is a big step in the right direction.
In fact, the security sector of the container market is actually heating up. Twistlock launched a few months ago with its sole reason for being to bring security to containers. That is certainly not the story with Illumio, which has quickly gained significant customer wins in the banking and large enterprise space.
Illumio will be demonstrating their solution for the Docker/Mesosphere stack at the re:Invent conference this week in Las Vegas.
