Many traditional security software providers have followed the gold rush to offer solutions for cloud native deployments. But finding a vendor that both meets the technology challenges associated with Kubernetes and microservices and offers a good fit for an organization’s specific needs can be a challenge — even while there has been a near explosion in purported solutions on offer that promise to offer “an exact fit.”

However, the security needs of virtual machines (VMs), while more mature as a technology, do not necessarily get the attention they deserve from third-party software security providers. The result is that organizations struggle to find security solution for VMs as well as for what is required for Kubernetes and microservices running on cloud-native platforms and integrated with service meshes.

“One of the frustrations that a lot of customers have expressed to us is that the traditional market for VM security is really a market that’s been defined by taking legacy technologies that were built for on-premises datacenters and traditional kind of server datacenter endpoint protection,” John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, said. “They are just kind of jamming that into a new marketing term, a new model and selling that as some sort of cloud-security product. But those products don’t really work well when you think about the way that people operate VMs in these modern stacks.”