Your organization is deploying containerized applications in a cloud environment.

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security strongly recommends shifting securityleftin the development lifecycle by integratingimage assessment directly into the CI/CD pipeline. This approach ensures vulnerabilities are detectedduring the build process, before images are deployed into production environments.

By pushing container images to Falcon for assessment as part of CI/CD workflows, Falcon expands image layers, inventories binaries and OS packages, and evaluates vulnerabilities early. This enables development and security teams to remediate issues before deployment, reducing risk exposure and preventing vulnerable images from ever reaching runtime.

Runtime-only analysis and host-based tools are insufficient for proactive security, as they detect issues after exposure has already occurred. Manual inspection does not scale and introduces human error, making it unsuitable for modern DevOps pipelines.

Therefore, integrating automated image assessment into CI/CD pipelines is theCrowdStrike best practicefor secure container deployments.