The shift to cloud-native infrastructure has introduced a difficult dilemma for many security and compliance teams: do compliance requirements and the desire for visibility impede the ability to use more secure systems in cloud-native environments? This tension arises from legacy tooling, evolving attack surfaces, and the rigidity of existing compliance standards. Without doubt, there are trade-offs between security, compliance, and visibility in modern containerized environments that are worth exploring.
As Kubernetes adoption grows, organizations are increasingly deploying clusters across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to support distributed applications, including AI/ML and edge workloads. This shift introduces new layers of complexity because each cloud provider and on-premises environment brings its own APIs, security models, and compliance requirements, making unified governance and consistent security controls even more challenging.
Cloud-native systems like Kubernetes operate on ephemeral workloads and immutable infrastructure, but traditional compliance tools demand persistent visibility to verify security. These challenges are magnified in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, where workload orchestration spans multiple providers and on-premises resources. Security teams must account for heterogeneous environments, diverse networking constructs, and the need for consistent policy enforcement across distributed clusters, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and edge workloads demand scalable, performant, and secure infrastructure. Here are few examples where this is problematic:
Unfortunately, sometimes security-conscious organizations that prioritize visibility end up retaining bloated, mutable systems that are vulnerable to configuration drift. Conversely, adopting secure-by-design container OSes may require you to redefine compliance workflows entirely. Purpose-built OSes reduce attack surfaces by 60–80% compared to general-purpose Linux, but may clash with auditors who are accustomed to Secure Shell or Secure Socket Shell (SSH) access and persistent logging.
Compliance is essentially an attempt to coagulate a pile of security policies into a single standard that applies across all implementations of technology. The goal is to create and enforce standards for best practices and procedures. If compliance is just about checking a box, it can lead teams to do the bare minimum to be able to say they are compliant. A minimalistic approach is not ideal, however, because security is constantly changing. Security teams need to be ready and able to address attack surfaces with newer technologies.
The reality is that auditors and standards don’t always keep up with technology, and different auditors may interpret the compliance standards differently. Sometimes, you may even be in the position of needing to explain how a new technology works—and why (and when) it makes sense to use it. Fortunately, some standards are open enough to allow for different technologies. As painful as compliance may be for some organizations, it’s important to have a shared way to enforce security. When it comes to security in Kubernetes environments, here are a few examples of challenges that you might need to consider.
Frameworks like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 (Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations), aka NIST SP 800-53, were designed for static infrastructure, creating friction with ephemeral Kubernetes pods. To address that, you can:
Mandated vulnerability scanners (such as Tenable) often fail to inspect container images. Replace traditional scanners with container-native monitoring, such as Trivy.
Explaining Kubernetes RBAC or Istio service mesh to compliance teams trained on VM-era concepts can be difficult, but not doing so will further delay any compliance certifications you’re seeking. You may also want to share information with auditors about how implementing compliance-as-code using Polaris, Kyverno, or Open Policy Agent (OPA) enables real-time checks for policy compliance.
Many teams struggle with the existential question of whether there is a way to balance visibility and security in order to align with compliance requirements. Or you may wonder whether it is possible to balance speed, automation, and security. The short answer is: you can’t really have all three. You’re going to have to decide how to prioritize, and this decision is really unique to your organization.
For example, if there is only a marginal security improvement with a specific tool in a specific environment, is it worth the processes you’ll need to put in place to provide that secure mechanism across the board? Sometimes it might be better to be slightly less secure, but have the visibility to know that you’ve been breached. (If you’re thinking that if you prioritize security, you’ll never be breached… unfortunately, that’s impossible to promise.)
A good way to decide which thing to prioritize is to consider what you are protecting against. What is your threat model? If someone breaks into your system, do they gain access to highly sensitive or confidential data, or just some metadata? Undoubtedly, if you hold healthcare or financial data, the stakes for securing it are higher. Following the relevant compliance frameworks can help you make sure you’re meeting your industry’s requirements. If you work in higher stakes industries, you can expect to have more onerous frameworks to follow, and you’ll have less choice about balancing security with speed or visibility.
One of the most effective ways to reconcile security and visibility in Kubernetes is through automation. By adopting Policy-as-Code frameworks and integrating automated security checks into your CI/CD pipelines, you can ensure that configurations are continuously validated against best practices and compliance standards before reaching production. Tools like Polaris, Kyverno, and OPA allow you to define and enforce policies automatically, providing real-time feedback to developers and security teams. This not only prevents non-compliant workloads from being deployed but also gives teams the visibility they need to quickly identify and remediate issues, all while reducing manual effort and operational overhead. You can also implement centralized logging with Fluentd or Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash (also known as the ELK Stack), distributed tracing with Jaeger, and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) integration to provide visibility across multi-cloud and edge environments.
Kubernetes has transformed how organizations build, secure, and scale modern infrastructure, but balancing security, compliance, and visibility, especially across hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments, remains a challenge. By embracing automation, Policy-as-Code, and CI/CD integrations, teams can automatically enforce standards, gain real-time visibility, and streamline compliance while supporting the agility that cloud-native workloads demand. As your Kubernetes journey continues, focus on continuous learning, leveraging the right tools for the job, and fostering collaboration between development, security, and operations. This approach will help ensure your infrastructure is secure and compliant—and your team is ready to adapt to whatever comes next in the maturing cloud-native landscape.
If you need help figuring out what secure and compliant infrastructure looks like, Fairwinds has years of experience building, delivering, and maintaining secure, compliant production-grade infrastructure. We can do that for you or we can assess your infrastructure design and recommend improvements to ensure your Kubernetes environment is enterprise-grade.