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What is CaaS And Why Must You Know About it?

Jun 24, 2021

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Innovative cloud service models, especially models and offerings that are ‘sold as a service’ are a popular app efficiency and more importantly app security approach for most modern businesses today. To add to this, we can say that offerings as a service (aaS) are a solution to shorten code, as well as improve security overall. When it comes to cloud computing, one will always come across things that are ‘as a service’ (abbreviated as aaS). There are several aaS acronyms that we need to define and look deep into cloud computing infrastructures to ascertain the cybersecurity technique and methods in use today, and if possible determine which are the best (or shall we say more optimal) approaches. CaaS is, according to one of the leaders in Infrastructure Services IBM: “Containers as a service (CaaS) is a cloud service model that allows users to upload, organize, start, stop, scale and otherwise manage containers, applications and clusters. It enables these processes by using either container-based virtualization, an application programming interface (API), or a web portal interface. CaaS helps users construct security-rich, scalable containerized applications through on-premises data centers or the cloud. Containers and clusters are used as a service with this model and are deployed in the cloud or onsite data centers.” Mainly, offerings come in the shape of infrastructure as a service or IaaS, platform as a service or PaaS, serverless options known as function as a service or FaaS, and of course our very own CaaS or containers as a service. In the next sections, we will try to simplify why a given service is a better choice for an organization, especially when it comes to cybersecurity.



What is The Cloud Anyway?


Cloud computing is not a new paradigm but has arisen due to the demand for quick, collaborative, and easy access and storage of data off-site (so that means somewhere other than on the company site, or company servers). The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), founded in 1901 as a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce describes cloud computing as follows; “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” To put this in easily relatable terms, cloud technologies are in use everywhere, every day by everyone. Apps like Google’s Mail and all the way to video conferencing all rely on a cloud offering. In those specific cases, we are talking about the public cloud. There are three types of cloud structures (separate from service offerings) are; the private cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud. In addition to that, we can also add the slightly rarer multi-cloud. The most common apps in use today by all of us are mostly on the public cloud.



What Are The Other Types of Cloud Offerings?


As-a-Service movements have been developing and gathering speed for years now, allowing organizations to bypass costly in-house technology development and utilizing the benefits of off-site agility to build what they need quickly and safely. There are several models of cloud computing service offerings (among which some are);




  • IaaS

  • SaaS

  • PaaS

  • CaaS


If we look at IaaS, for example; According to Microsoft’s Azure website, “Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a type of cloud computing service that offers essential compute, storage and networking resources on-demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis. IaaS is one of the four types of cloud services, along with software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and serverless.”



What Do CaaS And Other Cloud Offerings Mean For Cybersecurity?


We can peruse one of IBM’s diagrams to clarify cloud offering models of strategizing and how an organization can understand what is suitable for them with the following image (depending on the budget allotted for the cloud solution). IBM notes that these data center strategies will probably not be necessary for a company that has an unlimited budget which can build its own building full of servers and technical personnel. For most companies out there though, this is a rough model to judge the decisions by;


Source: https://developer.ibm.com/depmodels/cloud/articles/when-to-use-iaas-faas-paas-and-caas


So, looking at the diagram the key questions are when choosing a container-service provider: available budget, level of employee training, type of cloud structure to use, and whether to use a managed platform or not.



Services That Use CaaS


Container management is used by services like Kubernetes and Docker, which are required to make a microservice architecture work. We can expand more on CaaS, from a solid definition on Red Hat’s website which states; “CaaS is especially useful to developers in building containerized apps that are more secure and also scalable. Users can buy only the resources they want (scheduling capabilities, load balancing, etc.), saving money and increasing efficiency. Containers create consistent environments to rapidly develop and deliver cloud-native applications that can run anywhere.”



The Benefits of Using Containers


Containers (a term used to describe CaaS) have a range of benefits. CaaS can be considered to be a subset of IaaS, which can be placed between IaaS and PaaS. Several popular cloud-native apps and microservices use CaaS. Because the ‘basic resources’ of CaaS are these containers, this service offers a range of benefits that include;




  • Portability

  • Efficiency

  • Scalability

  • Heightened security

  • Speed


The usage of containers offers the benefit of self-contained apps, which can be easily deployed on public and private clouds and in multiple other environments. This also means that portability (moving workloads between places) is affected positively as well. Automatically, this tells us that horizontal scalability can reduce costs drastically. A CaaS service also increases efficiency because fewer resources are required overall so that containers can easily run on a single server instead of requiring several VM instances or additional operating systems. Now, when it comes to cybersecurity (digital safety and protection of systems and networks) a container service is very beneficial because these ‘containers’ are isolated and prevent lateral movement and/or cross-infection if malware were to befall the system. Finally, container services win on speed as well. As we have described above, because they do not require extra resources as well as separate instances or OSs, container reaction start/stop speed is almost instant. What this means is that development and the UX (user experience) are far better overall.


In conclusion, in the age of microservices, there really is no perfect or optimal solution because each offering-as-a-service has its own advantages and disadvantages. That is why some software developers and companies decide to mix some of these approaches to create a perfect Frankenstein. As far as cybersecurity is concerned, we are seeing CSaaS or Cybersecurity-as-a-Service appear. It is an outsourced solution that adds the benefit of in-house implementation impracticalities. This will allow any organization that applies it to save a lot of costs, reduce pressure on resources and departments, meanwhile giving access to trained cyber experts and the cutting-edge in technology.

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