Vulnerability management is a critical component of any modern day IT operation. Zero-day vulnerabilities are on the rise and even those vulnerabilities with patches can be cumbersome to remediate. First, application owners must be made aware of their vulnerabilities and potential patches. Then, these patches must be integrated into systems and code, and often this requires additional deployments or maintenance windows. Even when there is visibility to vulnerabilities, there is often a lag in remediation, often taking large organizations several months to patch.

While containers greatly improve the process of updating applications and minimizing downtime, there still remains a challenge that's inherent in vulnerability management. Especially since an attacker only needs to expose one such vulnerability, making anything less than 100% of the systems patched is a risk of compromise. 

What's needed is a faster feedback loop in addressing vulnerabilities. Continuous scanning and tying into the software deployment life cycle is key to speeding up the information and remediation of vulnerabilities. Luckily, this is exactly the approach that's being built into the latest container management and security tooling.