On Thursday, Red Hat picked up StackRox, a container and Kubernetes security start-up, a move that speeds up its enterprise cloud market ambitions.
The deal’s financial terms were not announced.
Around $65 million from a number of investors, including Menlo Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures, was raised by StackRox, based in Mountain View, Calif.
The business is seen as an innovator of efficient Kubernetes-native security capability and the transaction would add a large infrastructure and staff base to push the Kubernetes network of IBM-owned Red Hat.
With its Red Hat OpenShift platform, open-source Red Hat, which offers Linux, cloud, node, and Kubernetes enterprise technology, is now a big player.
A Kubernetes-native container protection framework has been developed by StackRox to help both security and DevOps teams execute security and compliance policies. For current instruments, the software can be combined. The organisation reports it generated over 240 percent sales growth in the first half of 2020.
The cornerstone of cloud-native software is Kubernetes, one of the fastest developing open source projects.
“Container security is the security of Linux,” Red Hat said in a statement announcing the deal with StackRox. “Red Hat will further expand its security leadership with this acquisition, adding the complementary capabilities of StackRox to enhance integrated security with greater simplicity and consistency across its open hybrid cloud portfolio,” the company said.
“With StackRox, Red Hat will concentrate on transforming how cloud-native workloads are secured by extending and refining the native controls of Kubernetes, as well as shifting security left into the container construction and CI/CD phase, to provide a coherent solution for improved security up and down the entire IT stack and throughout the lifecycle.”
Established in 2014, StackRox has turned its attention to the security of Kubernetes over the past two years. Through directly installing modules for compliance and deep data collection through the Kubernetes cluster infrastructure, the StackRox platform provides visibility across all Kubernetes clusters, reducing the time and effort necessary for security deployment, and streamlining security review, inquiry and remediation.
In addition to Red Hat OpenShift, the companies reiterated that some Kubernetes services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine Service (AKS), would continue to support StackRox (GKE).
Red Hat said that at a later point it aims to unlock StackRox’s source technology and will continue to support the KubeLinter ecosystem as well as new communities as Red Hat is focusing on StackRox’s open source offerings.
In July 2019, IBM purchased Red Hat for $34 trillion in cash to improve its position in the market for cloud services.
