Solutions
Security & Compliance
Apply security controls that reduce real risk without becoming a blocker for the teams that depend on the platform. We start with a threat model, implement policies incrementally in audit mode before enforcement, and build the operational practices — secret rotation, access reviews, audit logging — that make security sustainable.
The Business Problem
Security requirements that are unclear, unenforced, or that create friction without improving actual posture
The Challenge
Security in Kubernetes environments spans a wide surface: cluster access control, workload identity, network policies, image supply chain, secrets management, runtime threat detection, and compliance auditing. Each of these layers can be managed well or poorly, and weak links in any one area can undermine investment in the others.
Organizations often find themselves in one of two failure modes. Either security is a blocker — overly restrictive policies enforced without context, slowing deployment without clear risk justification — or it’s an afterthought, with clusters running without basic hardening and no clear ownership of security outcomes.
Our Approach
We approach security as an engineering discipline with a clear risk model. That means starting with a threat model: what are the realistic attack vectors for your environment, what are you protecting, and what controls actually reduce your risk profile versus creating compliance theater?
We implement security controls incrementally, with feedback loops. Policies start in audit mode, give teams visibility into what would be blocked, and move to enforcement after teams have adapted. Security should be understandable to the engineers subject to it — not an opaque set of restrictions handed down from a separate team.
We also push security left in the delivery lifecycle so secure behavior is the easiest behavior. That means policy checks, image scanning, and guardrails in CI/CD and admission workflows, with clear remediation guidance for developers before changes reach production.
We also focus on operational security posture: secret rotation, access review processes, audit log retention, and incident response playbooks. Good security is an ongoing practice, not a one-time configuration.
Technology Options
- RBAC hardening — principle of least privilege for cluster and namespace-level access, with regular access reviews
- Kyverno / OPA Gatekeeper — policy-as-code for enforcing security standards at admission time (image registries, resource limits, non-root containers)
- Pod Security Admission — Kubernetes-native enforcement of pod security standards (Restricted, Baseline, Privileged profiles)
- Falco — runtime threat detection for Kubernetes, alerting on anomalous container behavior
- Secrets management — External Secrets Operator + HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager for secrets that don’t live in etcd
- Image scanning — Trivy, Grype, or Clair in CI pipelines; image signing with Cosign for supply chain integrity
- Secure CI/CD & artifact trust — Harbor for private registry governance, vulnerability policy gates, and artifact lifecycle management; Sigstore/Cosign and in-toto attestations for signing, provenance, and verification across build and deploy workflows
- Network policies — Calico or Cilium network policies to enforce zero-trust segmentation between namespaces and services
- Audit logging — Kubernetes API server audit logs forwarded to a SIEM (Splunk, Elastic, Datadog) for compliance and incident investigation
- CIS Kubernetes Benchmark — baseline security configuration audit using kube-bench