Securing the Mission: Why Container Deployment Scanning Is Essential for the DoD

As DoD agencies accelerate cloud-native adoption under DOGE efficiency mandates, securing containerized workloads is essential to mission assurance. Learn why deployment-time scanning and admission controller enforcement are critical to reduce risk, meet compliance, and modernize security

Modern defense operations increasingly rely on cloud-native applications and containerized workloads to accelerate mission delivery, support agile development, and enhance scalability. In the wake of efficiency mandates driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), cloud-native applications offer a foundation for accelerating innovation, increasing efficiency, optimizing costs, and modernizing federal infrastructure.

However, like many emerging technologies, container adoption brings new challenges, particularly for federal agencies. Containers move fast, change frequently, and introduce new risks that traditional security tools weren’t built to handle. When you add the burden of compliance requirements, classified workloads, and strict security protocols, adoption becomes significantly more complex.

For the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), these risks are more than just theoretical. A single misconfigured or vulnerable container image can create a foothold for adversaries to steal sensitive data, disrupt critical systems, or compromise national security across multiple running containers. As DoD agencies adopt DevSecOps practices and shift security left, it’s critical that they mature container security capabilities from static, point-in-time assessments to continuous protection across the software lifecycle, including at deployment.

Why deployment-time scanning matters

Most security teams are familiar with scanning container images during development or in registries, but that’s only part of the picture. Once a container is deployed into a runtime environment, new risk factors emerge, such as:

• Changes to configurations or environment variables
• Inherited vulnerabilities from base images
• Drift from approved builds or hardened baselines

Deployment-time scanning ensures containers are evaluated in the context of the environment they’ll be running in, not just how they were built. This provides more accurate risk assessments, enforces compliance with DoD security frameworks, and enables rapid remediation of issues before they can be exploited. For mission-critical systems, this added layer of visibility and control is vital.

Enforcing security at the gate: The role of admission controllers

A critical capability in deployment-time scanning is the use of Kubernetes admission controllers. These are policy-enforcement points that evaluate containers before they’re allowed to run. Think of them as a security gatekeeper: they intercept deployment requests and check each request against your security policies, automatically blocking containers that don’t meet your predefined security criteria, which indicate they are non-compliant images.

For DoD environments, admission controllers play a vital role in enforcing strict runtime policies and compliance standards by:

• Preventing unauthorized or risky containers from being deployed
• Enforcing baseline security policies across development teams
• Reducing the risk of human error or misconfiguration in production
• Providing auditable controls aligned to the DoD Risk Management Framework and to the DoD’s DevSecOps guidance

In short, admission controllers help ensure that only secure, approved workloads make it into mission-critical environments, without slowing down the pace of innovation.

Tenable Enclave Security: Elevating container security to meet DoD mission demands

Tenable is excited to share that Container Security in Tenable Enclave Security now supports container-deployment scanning, giving defense and intelligence organizations powerful insight into container vulnerabilities in real time and directly in operational environments.

Tenable Enclave Security drives modernization in defense and intelligence agencies with core vulnerability management integrated with agile and flexible container-image scanning, playing a crucial role in agency efforts to innovate securely, accelerate mission delivery, support agile development, and enhance scalability.

Purpose-built for highly secure environments, like classified or air-gapped networks, Tenable Enclave Security reduces cyber risk by helping agencies see the risk in every IT asset and container image, and by delivering context-based intelligence and prioritized remediations across the infrastructure. And now, for agencies requiring FedRAMP High or Impact Level 5 authorization, it’s also available as a fully managed service, which simplifies deployment and operations for agencies with limited security resources or infrastructure.

Whether you’re running mission-critical applications in air-gapped networks or classified cloud enclaves, Tenable Enclave Security helps ensure your containerized workloads remain secure, compliant and ready to support the mission.

To learn more about how Tenable Enclave Security can help your agency, check out our webpage and the white paper “Checklist: Securing containers from development to runtime.”