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The Cloud Native Experts

"The Cloud Native Experts" at Aqua Security specialize in cloud technology and cybersecurity. They focus on advancing cloud-native applications, offering insights into containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure. Their work revolves around enhancing security in cloud environments and developing solutions to new challenges.

Rani Osnat

Rani is the SVP of Strategy at Aqua. Rani has worked in enterprise software companies more than 25 years, spanning project management, product management and marketing, including a decade as VP of marketing for innovative startups in the cyber-security and cloud arenas. Previously Rani was also a management consultant in the London office of Booz & Co. He holds an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. Rani is an avid wine geek, and a slightly less avid painter and electronic music composer.

Amit Sheps

Amit is the Director of Technical Product Marketing at Aqua. With an illustrious career spanning renowned companies such as CyberX (acquired by Microsoft) and F5, he has played an instrumental role in fortifying manufacturing floors and telecom networks. Focused on product management and marketing, Amit's expertise lies in the art of transforming applications into cloud-native powerhouses. Amit is an avid runner who relishes the tranquility of early morning runs. You may very well spot him traversing the urban landscape, reveling in the quietude of the city streets before the world awakes.

Amit Sheps

Lena Fuks

Lena Fuks is a Product Marketing Manager at Aqua. With a background in public relations for technology companies, Lena now writes blogs, whitepapers, and articles to help people understand the value of Aqua. She is passionate about simplifying complex things and engaging with audiences through storytelling. In her free time, Lena enjoys working out and watching beautiful Mediterranean sunsets.

Erin Stephan

Erin Stephan is the Principal Product Marketer for Aqua's Cloud Security portfolio. Erin has more than 10 years of product marketing experience in data protection and cybersecurity. She enjoys connecting with people, helping to articulate their challenges, and bringing products and solutions to the market that help solve those challenges. In her free time, you can find her catching a flight to a new city, shopping for new home décor, or taking a spin class.

Articles by The Cloud Native Experts

Cloud Application Security: Top 10 Threats and How to Stop Them

Application security in the cloud differs from securing on-premises applications, and introduces new challenges, over and above traditional application security concerns.

Cloud Native Glossary

Welcome to our cloud native glossary. Below you will find links to key concepts around Linux, container and container registries, Kubernetes, package management, IDEs, and CI/CD.

Application Modernization: The Basics and 7 Tips for Success

Cloud Native: Principles, Architecture, and Technology

Learn about the vision of cloud native applications and how design principles, architecture, and technology are making it a reality for production applications.

Cloud Native Architecture: 6 Principles for Success

Discover the 5 principles that will help make your cloud native architecture a success, and discover the pros and cons of cloud native development.

Open Policy Agent: Authorization in a Cloud Native World

Learn about Open Policy Agent (OPA) and how you can use it to control authorization, admission, and other policies in cloud native environments, with a focus on K8s.

What Is a Microservices Architecture?

Learn the basics of microservices architectures, pros and cons of microservices, and tips for building a successful microservices architecture.

Cloud Native Applications: A Practical Guide

Learn about the cloud native paradigm, types of cloud native infrastructure, cultural changes introduced by cloud native, and cloud native challenges

Cloud Native Landscape: The 6 Categories in Depth

Learn about the Cloud Native Landscape, which lists hundreds of cloud native technologies in six broad categories.

What Is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design pattern where services are provided to other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. The basic idea of SOA is to allow easy integration of various services into new applications, providing a flexible framework for application development.

What Is Web Application Security?

Web application security refers to the strategies and practices dedicated to protecting web applications from potential threats that can compromise their security. It is a branch of information security that particularly deals with the security aspects of websites, web applications, mobile applications, and web services.

What Is the Principle of Least Privilege?

The principle of least privilege, or PoLP, is an important concept in cybersecurity and information technology. It suggests that any system, user, or process should have access to only the absolute minimum privileges necessary to perform its function or task. This principle is integral to limiting the potential damage that could occur if a system or user were compromised.

What Is Threat Detection and Response (TDR)?

Threat detection and response is a cybersecurity strategy that involves the identification and mitigation of potential cyber threats. It is a proactive method used by organizations to protect their data and systems from cyber attacks.

What Is Threat Hunting?

Threat hunting is a proactive and iterative approach to detecting threats in a network that have gone unnoticed by automated security solutions. This process involves human-led investigations where analysts, equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge, manually hunt for advanced threats within an environment.

What Is the AI Executive Order (EO 14110)?

AI Executive Order, also known as EO 14110, was issued by the U.S. government on October 30, 2023. It outlines a comprehensive framework for the development, deployment, and governance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies within federal agencies and across the nation. It aims to promote AI innovation while ensuring that AI systems are developed and used in a manner that is ethical, secure, and respects privacy and civil rights.

What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers. It manages clusters of hosts running containers, and works with a wide range of container tools, including Docker. Kubernetes simplifies the deployment process, providing scalability and reliability while reducing the workload on operations teams.

What Are Cyber Security Threats?

Cybersecurity threats encompass any malicious activity aimed at compromising the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of information. These threats range from attacks on network infrastructure to the theft of individual data and can be carried out by a variety of actors, from individual hackers to organized crime groups and state-sponsored entities.

Arbitrary Code Execution: 6 Attack Examples and Mitigation Steps

Arbitrary code execution (ACE) refers to an attacker’s ability to run code of their choice on a target machine or process. It allows the attacker to gain unauthorized access or perform actions beyond the intent of the application's creators, potentially leading to data theft, corruption, or system compromise.

AI Attacks: Understanding, Identifying and Mitigating Attacks against AI Systems

In some respects, cybersecurity attacks that involve AI systems are similar to other, more traditional forms of attack. In other respects, they are completely unique threats that call for novel, innovative cybersecurity protections.

Prompt Injection

Malware Analysis: Static vs. Dynamic and 4 Critical Best Practices

Malware analysis is the process of examining malicious software to understand its functionality, behavior, and potential impact aiming to neutralize it or prevent future attacks.

What Is CSPM?

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a tool that continuously monitors and manages the security posture of cloud environments. It identifies and remediates risks associated with cloud resource configurations and compliance standards.

CIEM: 7 Key Capabilities and How to Choose a CIEM Solution

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a cloud security model that provides visibility over entitlements in the cloud environment.

Docker Container

The raw deal on Docker: architecture, concepts, basics, industry opinions, all the way to ninja topics like Docker Swarm and Docker Networking.

What Is a Virtual Machine (VM)?

A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software emulation of a physical computer, running an operating system and applications as if they were on physical hardware. VMs operate based on hypervisor software that allows multiple VMs to run on a single physical server, with each VM completely isolated from the others.

Containerized Applications: Components, Use Cases, and Best Practices

What Are Microservices?

A microservices architecture is a method of developing software systems that are structured as a collection of small, autonomous services. Each service is self-contained, focuses on a single business capability, and communicates with other services through well-defined APIs. This design allows for enhanced modularity, makes the application easier to understand, develop, and test, and makes its architecture more resilient to changing requirements.

Docker CIS Benchmark: Best Practices in Brief

Get the gist of the Docker CIS Benchmark recommendations for host configuration, Docker Daemon configuration and more, and learn to automate security testing.

What Is Docker Architecture?

Learn about the components of the Docker architecture: Docker Host, Network and Storage components, and the Docker Registry/Hub.

What Is Docker Networking? A Practical Guide

Learn about Docker network types, how containers communicate, common networking operations, and more.

What Is a Docker Registry?

Learn about Docker Registries, DockerHub, other public registries, and private registries

Software Supply Chain Attacks: 6 Examples and 6 Defensive Strategies

Supply chain attacks occur when a malicious actor infiltrates the development or distribution process of software to insert malicious code into a product or service.

Dependency Confusion Attack

What Is CI/CD Security?

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD, is a great way to develop applications efficiently based on a DevOps approach. But by default, CI/CD leaves out one absolutely critical consideration: Security.

What Is Secrets Management? Challenges and Best Practices

Are you keeping your organization's software secrets secret? If not, you're likely setting the business up for attack. Poor secrets management can open the door to a variety of threats, such as stolen login credentials and the exfiltration of sensitive data. Furthermore, failing to manage secrets properly can lead to unauthorized access to critical systems and significant financial and reputational damage. It can also result in compliance violations with heavy fines. It can also result in compliance violations with heavy fines.

Yarn vs. NPM: Which Package Manager You Should Choose, and Why?

Vulnerability Management Tools: Top 5 Open Source Solutions

Discover the key features of vulnerability management tools and meet five of the most popular and feature-rich open source solutions.

What Is Vulnerability Scanning?

One of the easiest ways for threat actors to hack an organization is to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in the software that it uses. By the same token, one of the most important steps organizations can take to protect themselves against attacks is to deploy vulnerability scanning, which helps them discover vulnerabilities before bad actors can wreak havoc.

Open Source Vulnerability Scanning: Methods and Top 5 Tools

Learn how open source vulnerability scanning works and discover tools that can help you identify and remediate vulnerabilities in OSS components and containers.

Vulnerability Remediation

Finding vulnerabilities is one thing - remediating vulnerabilities can be quite another. In fact, in some respects, vulnerability remediation is much more complicated and challenging than simply discovering them.

What is a Vulnerability Scanner?

A vulnerability scanner is a tool that continuously monitors computers, networks or applications to identify security vulnerabilities. The scanner compares the findings in the network or application against a database of known vulnerabilities to determine potential exploits.

What Is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?

In a world where security researchers discover more than 2,000 new vulnerabilities every month, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in vulnerability alerts – and to struggle to address them quickly. In fact, according to a 2023 study, it takes organizations between 88 and 208 days, on average, to patch vulnerabilities after discovering them.

Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) - Definition & Use Cases

Finding vulnerabilities using a vulnerability scanner is one thing. Determining whether a vulnerability you've discovered actually presents a risk for your specific application and environment is quite another. It often happens that a vulnerability is not exploitable under a particular configuration, which means the vulnerability doesn't pose a serious risk.

What Is Generative AI Security?

Generative AI security involves protecting algorithms and data in AI systems that can generate new content. Protecting these systems ensures they function as intended and prevents misuse. Key aspects include protecting the AI's integrity, ensuring generated content is reliable and secure, and preventing unauthorized access or manipulation.

Why Is It Important to Secure Large Language Models (LLM)?

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a complex machine learning model designed to understand, generate, and interpret human language. Built on neural networks using the Transformer architecture, these models learn from vast amounts of text data, making them capable of producing text that closely mimics human writing styles and patterns.

DevSecOps: 8 Essential Elements for Your DevSecOps Program

Learn about the 8 elements you need to implement DevSecOps in your organization, and best practices to take your DevSecOps program to the next level.

What Is a DevSecOps Pipeline, and How Can You Integrate It with a CI/CD Pipeline?

How can you put DevSecOps – a concept that emphasizes the integration of security into software development and IT operations – into practice? The answer, in many cases, boils down to creating a DevSecOps pipeline. By establishing the processes necessary for actually baking security into the various stages of the software delivery lifecycle, a DevSecOps pipeline helps organizations translate DevSecOps from theory into practice.

Putting DevOps Security Into Practice: 10 DevSecOps Best Practices

Once upon a time, the main focus of IT engineers was on system administration. Then, the introduction of DevOps in the 2000s extended the focus of many IT engineers to include the entire software delivery pipeline. Even more recently, DevSecOps came along and added security to the mix – with the result that people who once would have thought of themselves as SysAdmins now have a leading role to play in software security, too.

DevSecOps vs SecDevOps: Key Differences

At first glance, the difference between DevSecOps and SecDevOps may seem purely semantic, or the result of a simple variation on spelling. But in reality, DevSecOps and SecDevOps refer to different, albeit related, concepts. Each term also implies different priorities and practices.

What Is Threat Modeling?

Threat modeling is a structured approach used to identify, quantify, and address the security risks associated with an application. It is a vital part of the design process for any system that handles sensitive data.

eBPF Linux: How It Works, Use Cases & Best Practices

eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is a Linux kernel technology that allows for dynamic and efficient tracing of various system events.

Cloud DevOps: 3 Ways DevOps and the Cloud Work Together

See how DevOps and cloud computing are better together: DevOps using cloud infrastructure, CloudSecOps, and DevOps as a Service.

Understanding DevOps Tools and Breaking Down the Top 10

Discover the main categories of DevOps tools, including CI, CD and DevOps security, and learn about the top 10 tools used by DevOps organizations worldwide.

GitOps vs DevOps: Differences and Why They are Better Together

Understand the GitOps vs DevOps discussion - what is GitOps, how it is different than DevOps, and how GitOps helps DevOps teams solve deployment challenges.

What Is Code Security?

Code security is a set of practices carried out by developers to ensure the applications they create are protected against cyber threats. It is a method of developing software that is not only functional but also safe from malicious attacks. Code security has become an essential part of the software development life cycle, and it consists of strategies and practices that help in identifying and removing vulnerabilities in application code.

What Is Secure Code Review? Process, Tools, and Best Practices

Secure code review is the systematic examination of software source code, with the goal of identifying and fixing security vulnerabilities.

Infrastructure as Code and DevOps: DevOps Automation Reloaded

Learn how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is making DevOps better - enabling faster, safer, more predictable release cycles.

What Is Open Source Security?

Open source security involves practices and technology measures to protect open source software from vulnerabilities and attacks. It includes securing the software code, infrastructure, and data against unauthorized access and threats. Given open source software's public nature, and the availability of source code to attackers, security becomes crucial to prevent exploitation by malicious actors.

SecDevOps in Your Organization: A Practical Guide

Learn the difference between SecDevOps and DevSecOps, discover challenges and solutions, and get critical best practices for implementing SecDevOps in your organization

What Are AI Workloads?

AI workloads refer to the tasks and processes that artificial intelligence systems perform. These can range from data processing and machine learning model training to real-time inference and decision-making. AI workloads are typically classified into several categories:

7 Dimensions of Cloud Security, Top 10 Risks and How to Defend

Learn about key cloud security challenges, discover the cloud solutions technology landscape, and learn best practices to secure your cloud

7 Cloud Security Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Cloud Security Tools

What Is Code to Cloud Security?

Code to cloud is a cloud native security approach that has two primary aspects: identifying security issues in code and preventing them from reaching the cloud, and identifying security issues in cloud deployments and tracing them back to the code.

Cloud Protection

Cloud Security Frameworks

Cloud Security Standards

Cloud Computing Security Architecture

Cloud Workloads: Types, Common Tasks, and Security Best Practices

A cloud workload refers to the computing resources and tasks that are required to run an application or service in a cloud computing environment. This can include resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networking, as well as the software and applications that run on those resources.

Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud: 7 Key Differences and How to Choose

AWS GovCloud: Basics & How It Compares to Azure & GCP

What Is a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)?

Gartner initially coined the term "cloud workload protection platform" (CWPP), referring to security technology that protects hybrid and multi-cloud workloads including bare metal servers, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless functions. CWPP solutions provide visibility into all cloud-based workloads regardless of their location or granularity.

Cloud Workload Security: Risks, Controls, and 10 Best Practices

Learn how to secure cloud workloads and prevent risks like misconfiguration, social engineering and malware.

Google Cloud Security: How It Works and 10 Security Best Practices

Multi Cloud Security: 10 Critical Best Practices

Discover 5 multi cloud security considerations and 5 tips for improving multi cloud security in your organization

8 Cloud Compliance Standards & 7 Steps to Achieving Compliance

Cloud compliance ensures cloud services and data comply with guidelines and regulations relevant to the company that owns or operates those services.

Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)

Financial institutions are a prime target for cyberattacks. According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, the finance industry has the second-highest frequency of cyber attacks (after manufacturing), with 18.5% of all cyber attacks targeted at financial and insurance organizations.

How AWS PCI Compliance Works & 6 Customer Responsibilities

What is AWS PCI Compliance?

What Is FedRAMP Compliance?

FedRAMP, or the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, is a government-wide program that offers a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud services. This compliance program was designed to protect the data of U.S. federal agencies when they utilize cloud-based services.

What Is FedRAMP High Impact Level?

FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program), is a US government program that specifies how cloud services should undergo security assessment, authorization, and monitoring before they can be used by US government agencies. FedRAMP has three impact levels—Low, Moderate, and High—indicating the level of security required by cloud services for different government uses.

AWS FedRAMP: How AWS Complies with FedRAMP for U.S. Government Agencies

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) provides a comprehensive guide for assessing, authorizing, and continuously monitoring cloud products and services to ensure they are suitable for use by the U.S. federal government. This article explores how AWS aligns with FedRAMP’s rigorous standards and what this means for government agencies and other entities leveraging AWS's cloud services.