In February, Red Hat Inc. announced that it had closed the transaction to acquire StackRox, the Kubernetes and container security solution, as part of the company’s move to expand its security management offerings.

“We’re investing in things like role-based access control and so on,” said Ashesh Badani (pictured, right), senior vice president of cloud platforms at Red Hat. “We really felt like, look, we want to deepen our commitment to security. And so in conversations with StackRox we found just a great fit — a great team building a really interesting approach to Kubernetes security [with] a focus and a vision around this notion of ‘shift left.’”

“If we actually get [DevSecOps] into some of the Argo and the CI/CD pipeline work, then it just becomes something natural and not a secondary thought,” added Tracy Rankin (pictured, left), VP of OpenShift engineering at RedHat. “Because actually when it’s a secondary thought, we have exposures, and that’s not what a customer wants when they’re creating these workloads.”

Badani and Rankin spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Red Hat Summit. They discussed StackRox, OpenShift, security in software development and the challenges of hybrid cloud management. (* Disclosure below.)

Not every cloud needs the same solutions

More often than not, the modern CIO is also a cloud operator, managing a hybrid solution that’s tailored to meet their organization’s particular needs and situation — because not every organization has the same requirements, and not every cloud implementation can be identical. 

“We’re seeing a huge uptake right now — we’ve got customers, and they understand completely this hybrid cloud model where they’re purchasing OpenShift for certain applications and workloads that they want to run inside their own data centers,” Badani said. “And then [there are customers who] know that they don’t have to be inside their own data centers; they don’t want to have all of that operational complexity. They want to utilize some of the cloud.”

It’s not just about being in the data centers, according to Rankin. It’s about enablement.

“That’s really what OpenShift’s bread and butter is,” she said. “Let us create the ability for you to drive your workloads (whatever your workload is), modernize those workloads and place them wherever you want to.”

As hybrid cloud environments become more complex, there’s likely to be increased demand for solutions that can help CIOs manage this complexity. Finding ways to support various customer needs may be essential for cloud solutions providers in the near future.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE