Red Hat has finalised its acquisition of container security company StackRox.
StackRox’s Kubernetes-native security technology will enable Red Hat customers to build, deploy, and secure applications across multiple hybrid clouds.
In a blog post, Ashesh Badani, senior vice president of cloud platforms at Red Hat, said over the past several years, the company has “paid close attention to how our customers are securing their workloads, as well as the growing importance of GitOps to organisations.”
“Both of these have reinforced how critically important it is for security to “shift left” – integrated within every part of the development and deployment lifecycle and not treated as an afterthought,” Badani said.
Badani said the acquisition would allow Red Hat to add security into container build and CI/CD processes.
“This helps to more efficiently identify and address issues earlier in the development cycle while providing more cohesive security up and down the entire IT stack and throughout the application lifecycle.”
He added the company’s software provides visibility and consistency across all Kubernetes clusters, helping reduce the time and effort needed to implement security while streamlining security analysis, investigation, and remediation.
“StackRox helps to simplify DevSecOps, and by integrating this technology into Red Hat OpenShift, we hope to enable users to enhance cloud-native application security across every IT footprint,” added Badani. Red Hat initially announced the acquisition in January. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In the previous announcement, Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier said securing Kubernetes workloads and infrastructure “cannot be done in a piecemeal manner; security must be an integrated part of every deployment, not an afterthought.”
Red Hat said it would open source StackRox’s technology post-acquisition and continue supporting the KubeLinter community and new communities as Red Hat works to open source StackRox’s offerings.
KubeLinter is an open-source project StackRox started in October 2020 that analyses Kubernetes YAML files and Helm charts for correct configurations, focusing on enabling production readiness and security earlier in the development process.
StackRox will continue supporting multiple Kubernetes platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Kamal Shah, CEO of StackRox, said the deal was “a tremendous validation of our innovative approach to container and Kubernetes security.”