Red Hat buys Kubernetes native security company StackRox

Red Hat, Inc, the open source solutions provider, has announced its intent to acquire StackRox, the innovative container security company, and Kubernetes. Red Hat is bringing powerful native Kubernetes security capabilities from StackRox to Red Hat OpenShift, the market-leading Kubernetes enterprise platform, expanding its focus. It provides a single, comprehensive platform that allows users to securely build, deploy and run almost any application across the hybrid cloud.

REMEMBER

Kubernetes, one of the fastest growing open source projects, is the foundation for cloud-native applications critical to cross-industry digital transformation. As adoption of containers and Kubernetes increases in production environments, challenges remain. According to Gartner, "Enterprise use of containers for production deployments continues to be limited by issues related to security, monitoring, data management and networking."

To address these concerns, enterprises need solutions that provide a secure foundation for modern workloads.

Container security is Linux security. Red Hat has long been a leader in open source enterprise security, starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to continuously evolve to set new standards for securing cloud-native environments. Building on this foundation, OpenShift takes a layered approach to securing containers and integrates security throughout the container lifecycle, from creation to deployment and execution in critical business environments.

With this acquisition, Red Hat will further extend its security leadership and add StackRox's complementary capabilities to more easily and consistently strengthen integrated security across its open hybrid cloud portfolio. With StackRox, Red Hat is focused on changing the way cloud-native workloads are protected by extending and refining native Kubernetes controls and moving security remaining in the build phase. Containers and CI / CDs provide a unified solution to improve security across the IT stack and throughout the lifecycle.

Founded in 2014 with the goal of reinventing enterprise security, StackRox has evolved over the past two years to focus on Kubernetes security. Unlike first-generation container security platforms, which often focused on the container offering, StackRox differentiates itself with its native Kubernetes security platform. This allows organizations to more easily control and enforce policies using the same declarative approach as Kubernetes to scale their applications while maintaining the required security.

StackRox software provides visibility into all Kubernetes clusters by deploying components for application and comprehensive data collection directly into the Kubernetes cluster infrastructure. This reduces the time and effort required to implement security and optimize analytics, security investigations, and repairs. The StackRox policy engine includes hundreds of built-in controls for enforcing security best practices, industry standards such as CIS benchmarks and NIST, and managing container and Kubernetes configuration and runtime security.

In addition to Red Hat OpenShift, StackRox will continue to support various Kubernetes platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

StackRox also simplifies DevSecOps and makes cloud-native environments inherently more secure by integrating directly with application channels and existing CI / CD, image scanning and customer registration tools. In October 2020, StackRox released KubeLinter, an open source project that analyzes Kubernetes YAML files and Helm diagrams for correct settings, with a focus on enabling production readiness and security early in the development process day.

Red Hat plans to offer open source with StackRox technology following the acquisition. Red Hat will continue to support the KubeLinter community and new communities in the development of the open source StackRox offering.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021 under the given conditions