Red Hat Plans to Acquire & Open Source StackRox's Container Security Technology

In a recent press release by Red Hat, it has announced that it will be acquiring StackRox, which specializes in container and Kubernetes security.

The acquisition is expected to complete by the first quarter of 2021 but no amount has been mentioned for the deal. It is a good move for Red Hat while being under the leadership of CEO Arvind Krishna after IBM acquired it for $34 billion.

Of course, with the specialization and work of StackRox, Red Hat aims to improve and extend their quality of offering with OpenShift (a hybrid cloud platform to build and deploy Kubernetes powered services).

I’ll mention a few insights on what Red Hat plans to do after acquiring StackRox.

Why is Red Hat Acquiring StackRox?

Red Hat is a major enterprise-focused company and OpenShift is a quite successful hybrid cloud platform on Kubernetes.

Even though it leads with the service offerings, acquiring a security leader StackRox makes the OpenShift platform the ultimate offering for every customer who put emphasis on the security of their applications and services.

In their press release they’ve mentioned it clearly as well:

By bringing StackRox’s powerful Kubernetes-native security capabilities to Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat will further its vision to deliver a single, holistic platform that enables users to build, deploy and securely run nearly any application across the entirety of the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat is already an Industry leader in enterprise Linux along with its security, with the following acquisition, it simply broadens its leadership.

And, of course, with the resources and help of Red Hat, StackRox can scale up their innovative services to improve with a big leap forward.

Moving Forward: Plans to Open Source StackRox Technology

For StackRox customers, it is certainly a great news considering that they will potentially get access to new resources and the acquisition will let them scale up quickly.

With Red Hat, StackRox will be involved in OpenShift. Not only that, StackRox will continue to support multiple Kubernetes platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Red Hat also plans to open-source StackRox’s technology post acquisition while supporting their offerings like KubeLinter, which should be definitely exciting.

Paul Cormier (President and CEO, Red Hat) also issued a statement for the acquisition:

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.

To get more details on the acquisition and how it affects both the companies, you can check out Red Hat’s press release and StackRox press release as well.

What do you think about Red Hat’s move to acquire StackRox? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.