As companies embrace containerized, cloud-native applications, they recognize that the need for security is paramount but can struggle to secure these new technologies. Because most people are learning the new stack, few have a clear roadmap for how to apply security across the various stages of the containerization journey. Each stage introduces novel security challenges, and organizations must learn the infrastructure and the security at the same time. 

Understandably, security needs to evolve as companies move from developing their first containerized application to using entirely new development processes to build containers and managing thousands of microservices. The following maturity model can help organizations understand and successfully meet the security challenges that go along with adopting and expanding containerized applications.