In the ever-evolving landscape of digital business operations, staying ahead of the curve requires constant adaptation and innovation. Kong Mesh 2.4 contains several enhancements to help your organization's infrastructure be more efficient. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key benefits of Kong Mesh 2.4 across three critical domains: security, resilience, and flexibility.

## Security: Safeguarding your digital assets

In today’s interconnected world, ensuring the security of your digital assets is non-negotiable. Kong Mesh 2.4 introduces essential security enhancements that are paramount for businesses.

**User-Provided Metrics Certificates: ** Kong Mesh 2.4 introduces an often-requested feature by allowing users to provide their own certificates for secure Prometheus metrics scraping. Expanding on the previous profiles that were limited to either no security (non-critical meshes) or mesh mutual TLS (mTLS). This update provides the flexibility to use your own certificates, securing the traffic between Prometheus instances and Kong Mesh.

This capability enhances data security while also simplifying the integration of Prometheus instances with applications outside the mesh.

## Flexibility: Adapting to business needs

**Cross-Zone Routing Improvements**: One of Kong Mesh’s strengths lies in its cross-zone routing capabilities. However, until now, creating "complex" parameterized VirtualOutbound connections were limited within zones. With Kong Mesh 2.4, flexible cross-zone routing for VirtualOutbounds is now supported, enabling secure access to more complex services in remote zones, like those utilized by Kafka. This expansion of cross-zone routing empowers businesses to seamlessly interact with services across geographical boundaries for whatever the business needs — compliance, performance, budgeting, etc.

## Resilience: Keeping your business running smoothly

**Wait for Sidecar to Be Ready:** In Kubernetes environments, sidecar and application containers often start in parallel, potentially causing network availability issues. Kong Mesh 2.4 introduces the ability to configure the sidecar to wait until it is ready before launching the application container. This feature ensures that the application container has network access when it starts, reducing the risk of connectivity problems.

Kong Mesh 2.4 isn’t just another update; it’s a strategic move for organizations looking to secure their digital assets, maintain uninterrupted service availability, and adapt to changing market dynamics.

With this release, Kong Mesh also embedded some powerful new capabilities that we’re excited to share at API Summit 2023 around simpler installations, easier platform operations, and further enabling federated teams to work effectively and collaboratively.

Join us at API Summit on September 27 and 28 to learn more. [Register for free now](http://www.konghq.com/conferences/kong-summi)Register for free now.

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