In-Q-Tel taps cloud security expert Sysdig to modernize govt agencies

Barely a month after announcing a new approach to cloud visibility and security, Sysdig is tapped by the Intelligence Community funding arm, In-Q-Tel, for a strategic partnership.

With this partnership, Sysdig will give government agencies insight and control as they transition to modern IT architectures, including Kubernetes, containers, and multi-cloud deployments.

“Sysdig’s cutting-edge solutions will give our agencies the ability to identify vulnerabilities, enforce compliance, and monitor application and service performance”

As a company that describes itself as “container-obsessed,” Sysdig will provide US government agencies with the Sysdig Cloud-Native Visibility and Security Platform (VSP), giving agencies insight and control as they transition to modern IT architectures, including Kubernetes, containers, and multi-cloud deployments.

Sysdig’s approach starts with an open source core: leveraging well-known Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects such as Falco and Prometheus, combined with Sysdig’s original eponymous project, the platform provides open source with enterprise management, security, and support.

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Since In-Q-Tel (IQT) identifies and accelerates the development of cutting-edge technologies to support the missions of US government agencies, the strategic partnership with Sysdig is meant to give more visibility to government agencies while bringing them up-to-speed with the latest security measures.

“With the Sysdig Visibility and Security Platform, our government partners will gain insight and control as they move to adopt modern, cloud-native approaches,” said IQT Technical Staff Senior Member Luke Berndt, in a statement.

“Sysdig’s cutting-edge solutions will give our agencies the ability to identify vulnerabilities, enforce compliance, and monitor application and service performance,” he added.

The container-obssessed company already monitors and secures tens of millions of containers across hundreds of enterprises, and now it will lend this expertise to more government agencies via IQT.

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“Sysdig is honored to work with IQT to help our government agencies minimize operational complexity and risk by uncovering blind spots in cloud-native applications,” said Sysdig CEO Suresh Vasudevan, in a statement.

“We are already working with US federal and local governments, along with international government agencies, and we will continue to provide innovative solutions through our partnership with IQT,” he added.

Sysdig’s real world use cases include:

• Container Forensics: Container forensics and postmortem analysis improves your security posture, helping to understand and contain the impact of any security breach, where your company revenue and reputation, may both, be at stake. Allows to respond faster to security incidents and recover effectively.
• Continuous Security: The standard process of software and configuration management, hardening services and enforcing compliance doesn’t work for modern DevOps teams. Making security part of the CI/CD process is known as continuous security.
• Prometheus Monitoring: Open source Prometheus enables developers to instrument code for nearly any metric to get insight into application use and performance. At scale and in production, enterprise organizations look for global metric views, long-term data retention, and more.
• Microservices Monitoring: Modern microservices are displacing monolithic application stacks, accelerating development and deployment speed, simplify scaling and more. With all of its advantages, a microservices-approach increases the complexity of monitoring and troubleshooting applications.
• Kubernetes Monitoring, Troubleshooting: Kubernetes simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications and microservices. This helps to keep services up and running, but to identify and resolve underlying problems such as slow performance, failed deployments, and connection errors, you need the ability to gather and visualize in-depth information from across your environment.

The unprecedented level of visibility into cloud-native infrastructure will now be aimed at helping government agencies accelerate modernization, improving the health and risk posture of their environments, reducing the cost of operations, detecting vulnerabilities, and preventing attacks.