Pivotal Software, Inc. has said it will provide secure images of Canonical Ltd’s Ubuntu Linux distribution atop of its Cloud Foundry platform, in another move that highlights the steady shift towards cloud-native infrastructure.

The new partnership was announced on Wednesday, when the two companies said they would continue working to “harden” Ubuntu on Cloud Foundry to comply with benchmarks set by the U.S. government. These benchmarks include the U.S. military standard, the Security Technical Implementation Guide, which is set by the Defense Information Systems Agency, as well as the Center for Internet Security benchmark.

That Pivotal and Canonical are so eagerly pursuing this initiative suggests that they see government and other highly regulated customers as a key growth area for cloud infrastructure. This was underlined by the announcement that the two partners will also seek to create an industry standard set of security certifications for running Ubuntu on cloud-native platforms. More details of this initiative will be revealed later in the year, the companies said.

Pivotal pointed to Ubuntu’s predictable six-month software update schedule and also its growing enterprise adoption in both the cloud and on-premises as reasons for its decision to embrace the operating system. The company added that Canonical’s security track record and its heavy focus on Linux-based application containers was another reason.

For Canonical, the deal means it’s Ubuntu distro gains more exposure with another respected cloud platform provider that counts large enterprises such as Ford Motor Co. among its backers. Ford led Pivotal’s most recent $253 million funding round last May, which was the second largest round so far this year. Ford was joined by Microsoft (its first investment in Pivotal) and also previous investors General Electric Corp., EMC Corp., and VMware Inc.

Following that round, Pivotal’s value is now almost $3 billion, and the company claims to work with around a third of the Fortune 100 companies.

Pivotal said the new funds would be primarily used to scale up its development platform and extend it with new analytics and cloud capabilities. The round came after Pivotal previously announced plans for an enterprise cloud-native stack that for running and scaling container-based cloud-native applications, which combines Cloud Foundry with Vmware’s Photon platform.

The deal with Canonical helps Pivotal to address security issues like delivering certified Ubuntu images on Cloud Foundry. The two partners will provide automated security patch management to ensure Cloud Foundry users have a “rapid response” to any new vulnerabilities that pop up on the platform.

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