Red Hat to strengthen Kubernetes security with StackRox Acquisition

Red Hat announced its intention to acquire Kubernetes and container security startup StackRox.

Founded in 2014, California-based StackRox is a provider of Kubernetes-native security platform for cloud-native applications, containers, serverless, and Kubernetes. To date, the company has raised a total of $65.5M in four funding rounds, according to CrunchBase.

Red Hat also plans to open-source StackRox’s technology post-acquisition, says the announcement.

President and CEO, Red Hat, 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 adds StackRox's Kubernetes-native capabilities to OpenShift's layered security approach, furthering our mission to bring product-ready open innovation to every organization across the open hybrid cloud across IT footprints."

CEO, StackRox, Kamal Shah, said, "We're thrilled to join forces with Red Hat, coupling the industry’s first Kubernetes-native security platform with the leading Kubernetes platform for hybrid cloud, multicloud, and edge deployments. This is a tremendous validation of our innovative approach to container and Kubernetes security. Red Hat is an ideal partner to accelerate our vision of enabling organizations to securely build, deploy and run their cloud-native applications anywhere."

Red Hat plans to bring StackRox’s Kubernetes-native security capabilities to Red Hat's own enterprise kubernetes platform OpenShift.

Red Hat also intends to focus on securing cloud-native workloads with Kubernetes’ native controls.  The StackRox acquisition also helps Red Hat to build security at the time of building container and in CI/CD phase itself, notes the announcement.

StackRox will keep on supporting multiple Kubernetes platforms including Red Hat OpenShift platform, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).