Database security shouldn’t be hard, so Imperva has made it simple. Imperva Cloud Data Security (CDS) is a SaaS solution specifically designed to secure organizations’ data stored in their AWS managed databases (DBaaS). It works with all database types available through Amazon RDS, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MariaDB, Oracle, and Amazon Aurora. You can try it out for free here.

For organizations that purchase solutions through AWS, buying CDS via the AWS Marketplace unlocks some great advantages. It minimizes procurement friction by consolidating vendors and billing. Buying CDS applies towards organizations’ AWS spending commitments. Since CDS participates in the Private Offers purchasing program, organizations can also negotiate customized terms, pricing and payment schedules.

Transform DBaaS security to keep up with digital transformation
We’re currently witnessing a huge transformation in how organizations store and use data. Industry analysts believe that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed in the cloud. Imperva’s own research reveals that 96% of organizations are using DBaaS, and almost half of all organizations have 75% or more of their data in a DBaaS environment.

Why is this seismic shift happening? The short answer is because of the advantages DBaaS provides in cost, flexibility and agility. Cloud platform providers like AWS have made it extremely easy and inexpensive to provision new managed databases. The evolution toward DevOps processes to develop, test and deploy IT solutions has also resulted in a huge proliferation of managed databases in use.

With all this sudden and accelerating growth in DBaaS and the speed it brings, organizations are struggling to keep track of all the databases they use, let alone which ones hold sensitive, compliance-relevant information. How do they secure data they don’t even know about?

AWS secures the platform, but not your data
A common misconception among organizations using AWS DBaaS is that AWS’s default security protects their data. AWS does offer terrific security, but it only covers the infrastructure used for their DBaaS offerings. In other words, AWS DBaaS native security protects the platform, but not your data.

You can be confident that the underlying OS and database technologies used are fully protected. But as explained by AWS themselves in their shared responsibility model disclosure, they take no responsibility for what their customers put into their managed databases and what they do with it. It’s up to each organization to ensure their data is properly secured.

CDS delivers security in minutes
As a SaaS solution, CDS requires no software installation. Within a few minutes, CDS reveals the location and security status of all your data and begins alerting you when any violations of your security policies occur. At any time, you can also run comprehensive reports to support security reviews or compliance audits.

CDS will also help you identify security issues you didn’t even know existed, by developing a baseline understanding of typical user behavior, and notifying you when it detects atypical or unusual activity.

Why home-grown DBaaS security tools are not an option
AWS offers a lot of powerful tools and services for “builders” of IT solutions. In theory, these can be used to assemble a security solution for DBaaS. Some organizations we’ve talked to have tried to use this approach.

In practice, we’ve found that most of them underestimated the effort and simply don’t have the time or the skill set needed to assemble and maintain this kind of solution. What they thought would be a simple effort turned out to be a massive, ongoing project.

Security needs are not constant. Internal teams’ demands grow and change on a regular basis, requiring a level of scalability and flexibility that’s difficult for home-grown tools to match. By comparison, CDS offers a purpose-built, inexpensive, scalable SaaS alternative that focuses on your DBaaS security so you don’t have to.

Company CEO Jeremy Burton said rather than build another data lake platform, it makes more sense to make an observability platform available using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application model based on an existing cloud service.

Burton said Snowflake, which is based on a relational database running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, has already proven it can scale to ingest logs, traces and metrics. The Observe platform leverages that platform to correlate that data to monitor application and infrastructure environments in a way that provides more context than legacy tools that monitor software components and infrastructure in isolation.

The context is achieved by creating a “resource” to represent, for example, a user, a session, a shopping cart, a pod, a container, a help-desk ticket or a build. Observe then enables IT teams to also track relationships between resources in a way that the average IT administrator can query without having to tag each resource, said Burton. IT teams can also track how the attributes of a resource change over time, which Burton noted can be employed to reconstitute the state of an entire IT system at any point in time.

That approach can be applied just as easily to existing monolithic applications and emerging microservices applications because all the data required is ingested into the Snowflake service without requiring IT teams to first instrument and then update each application, added Burton.

The pricing model for Observe will be based on the amount of data stored in the AWS S3 bucket and the number of queries launched. IT teams will purchase Observe credits that are billed only when the platform is actually used, noted Burton.

While observability is a core tenant of best DevOps practices, Burton said there is a need to democratize observability in a way that allows any member of an IT team to troubleshoot any issue. There shouldn’t be a requirement to assemble every member of an IT team to diagnose an issue, said Burton, noting over time, that just aggravates developers who don’t really need to deal with, for example, an infrastructure issue.

IT teams will be provided access to dashboards that enable novice or intermediate users to quickly ascertain the root cause of an issue, while more seasoned engineers with be provided access to worksheets based on a spreadsheet-like interface through which they can manipulate data, said Burton.

Competition among providers of observability platforms is already fierce. However, as organizations look to rationalize existing legacy monitoring tools in favor of platforms that add more context, the overall size of the observability market will be measured in billions of dollars. Each IT teams will need to decide what type of platform makes the most sense for them based on costs and their preference for one capability a vendor might have that another doesn’t provide.

What Is Application Containerization?

Application containerization is an operating system-level virtualization method used to deploy and run distributed applications without launching a full virtual machine for each workload. Containers package an application and its dependencies into a single, isolated unit that shares the host operating system kernel. This makes containers significantly more lightweight than traditional VMs while still providing process-level isolation.

Multiple containerized applications can run on a single host simultaneously, each isolated from the others but sharing the same underlying OS kernel. This approach reduces resource overhead, speeds up startup times, and simplifies dependency management across development, staging, and production environments.

Key Market Drivers

Several converging trends are accelerating adoption of application container technology:

• Containers vs. Virtual Machines: Growing recognition that containers offer faster startup, lower memory footprint, and higher density than traditional VMs is driving organizations to shift workloads to container-based infrastructure.
• Cloud-native adoption: The widespread move to cloud-based computing has made containers a natural fit, as they align closely with the elasticity and automation that cloud platforms provide.
• IoT and edge computing: The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is creating demand for lightweight, portable runtimes that containers are well-positioned to satisfy at the edge.
• SME investment: Small and medium-sized enterprises are increasingly investing in container technology to improve deployment agility and reduce infrastructure costs.
• Database as a Service (DBaaS): The emergence of DBaaS offerings is complementing containerized application architectures, expanding the overall ecosystem.

Market Challenges and Restraints

Despite strong growth momentum, the application container market faces meaningful headwinds:

• Security risks: Because containers share a host kernel, a kernel vulnerability can potentially affect all containers on that host. Misconfigured containers, overly permissive image registries, and supply-chain risks in base images remain active concerns for security teams.
• Operational complexity: Orchestrating containers at scale—particularly across hybrid or multi-cloud environments—introduces significant complexity around networking, storage, observability, and access control.
• Skills gap: Container-native tooling (Kubernetes, service meshes, container registries) requires specialized knowledge that many organizations are still building internally.

Leading Players in the Application Container Market

The application container ecosystem is served by a broad mix of hyperscalers, enterprise software vendors, and specialist platforms. Notable participants include:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Offers Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate for managed container workloads.
• Docker Inc. – Creator of the Docker container runtime and image format that became the de facto standard for application packaging.
• Google – Originated Kubernetes internally (as Borg/Omega) before open-sourcing it; offers Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
• Microsoft Corporation – Provides Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and deep Windows container integration.
• IBM Corporation – Offers IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift following its acquisition of Red Hat.
• Red Hat, Inc. – Maintains OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform widely used in regulated industries.
• Rancher Labs (acquired by SUSE) – Known for the Rancher multi-cluster Kubernetes management platform.
• Mesosphere (now D2iQ) – Early pioneer in distributed container orchestration with its DC/OS platform.
• Joyent (acquired by Samsung) – Contributed early container-native infrastructure thinking, particularly around Triton.
• CA Technologies (now Broadcom) – Provides enterprise DevOps tooling that integrates with container-based pipelines.

Technology Trends Shaping the Market

The container landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Key technology directions include:

• Kubernetes as the orchestration standard: Kubernetes has consolidated its position as the dominant container orchestration platform, with all major cloud providers offering managed Kubernetes services.
• Service meshes: Tools such as Istio and Linkerd add traffic management, mutual TLS, and observability layers to containerized microservices.
• WebAssembly (Wasm): An emerging lightweight runtime that may complement or partially compete with containers for certain edge and serverless use cases.
• eBPF-based networking and security: Extended Berkeley Packet Filter tooling (used by Cilium and Falco, among others) is improving container networking performance and runtime security visibility.
• GitOps and CI/CD integration: Container image builds are increasingly embedded in automated pipelines with policy enforcement at the registry level before images ever reach production.

Market Outlook

The application container market is expected to continue its strong growth trajectory, driven by ongoing cloud migration, the maturation of Kubernetes-based platforms, and increasing enterprise confidence in running stateful workloads in containers. Investment activity—including acquisitions, joint ventures, and R&D spend—across the ecosystem reflects the strategic importance vendors place on container-native infrastructure.

For DevOps and platform engineering teams, staying current with container security practices, orchestration tooling, and emerging standards (such as the OCI image and runtime specifications) will be essential as the ecosystem matures.

Note: Market sizing and forecast figures referenced in the original source material were not independently verified. Readers seeking specific market size data should consult primary analyst reports from firms such as Gartner, IDC, or Forrester.