Objective 5: Assess Your Containers

Containers are specialized groupings of resources needed to run a software application. Unlike traditional virtual machines, containers simply borrow the operating system and computing resources from their host. Using container images as blueprints, containers only consist of whatever tools are necessary for running their assigned application.

This lightweight design is what makes containers fast, effective, and widely used in modern networks.

See the Working with Containers page to learn more about InsightVM’s container assessment capabilities.

Risk Factor

Container environment architecture has inherent security concerns. Although containers are designed to be isolated, any attacker that gains access to a container could theoretically find a way to the host machine. Hosts can have thousands of containers running concurrently, so the security of the images from which they are built is extremely important.

To this end, InsightVM offers container image assessment along with several other features to ensure that your containers are as low-risk as possible.

Examine Your Container Images

Open the Containers tab in your left navigation menu to see a list of images that the Insight Agent has found so far. By default, your most vulnerable images will be listed first. See Managing Container Images for more information about this screen.

Assess Your Images

InsightVM will automatically assess images as long as it has access to them. In cases when images are not accessible, you can assess them manually. See the Assessing an image section for instructions on how to do this.

Connect to a Registry

InsightVM supports connections to several container registries. Connect to any of these registries to access repositories of container images that you can use in your environment. See the Managing Container Connections page to learn how.

Assess Containers With the CI/CD Plugin

InsightVM also features container assessment using our Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery plugin. Use this feature to assess your containers against custom policies that you configure. See the Containers CI/CD Plugin and Containers Build Interface pages for more information and installation instructions.