The correct answer is They keep pace with the ephemeral nature of containers so security actions remain timely.

Containers in cloud native environments are often created and destroyed in seconds or minutes so security controls must act as quickly as workloads appear. Manual processes and human approvals cannot reliably detect and remediate risks within those short lifecycles and they will miss many short lived instances.

Automated security solutions integrate with the orchestration platform and the CI CD pipeline to provide near real time detection and enforcement. This allows policies to be applied at creation time and for runtime actions to be taken immediately when an issue is detected so the environment remains protected as pods and containers rapidly change.

They reduce the need for manual identity and access management tasks is incorrect because reducing manual IAM work is only one benefit and it does not address the core problem of containers disappearing quickly. IAM automation helps administrative overhead but it does not by itself ensure timely responses to short lived workloads.

They increase container performance by optimizing resource usage is incorrect because performance optimization is primarily an orchestration and resource management concern. Security automation focuses on detection, policy enforcement, and remediation rather than improving runtime performance.

They enable continuous vulnerability scanning and policy enforcement across clusters is incorrect in this question because although continuous scanning and enforcement are valuable benefits they do not directly explain why automation is essential for ephemeral workloads. The key reason is that automation keeps security actions timely as containers come and go.

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