VMware Announces Intent To Acquire Octarine

VMware has announced the intent to acquire Octarine during Connect 2020, the company’s annual cybersecurity user and partner conference (hosted virtually by VMware Carbon Black)

Octarine’s innovative security platform for Kubernetes applications helps simplify DevSecOps and enables cloud native environments to be intrinsically secure, from development through runtime.

Protecting workloads is critical to the security of applications and data inside every organisation. The unique properties of the cloud (speed, agility, scale) mean that developers are increasingly using Kubernetes and containers to modernise applications and changing the nature of workloads that need to be secured.

As with any major technology adoption, attackers are not far behind, looking to take advantage of new risk areas. Building Octarine’s innovative Kubernetes security platform into the VMware security portfolio presents a major opportunity for VMware to further mitigate risks in several ways:

• Provide full visibility into cloud-native environments so customers can better identify and reduce the risks posed by vulnerabilities and attacks.
• Move beyond static analysis and maintain compliance – customers can create and enforce content-based policies to protect the privacy and integrity of sensitive and regulated information.
• Integrate into the developer lifecycle to analyse and control application risks before they are deployed into production.
• Run alongside service mesh frameworks such as Tanzu Service Mesh to provide native anomaly detection and threat monitoring for cloud and container-based workloads.
• Provide runtime monitoring and control of Kubernetes workloads across hybrid environments for threat detection and response.

Following the acquisition’s close, the Octarine technology will be embedded into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, providing new support of security features for containerised applications running in Kubernetes and enable security capabilities as part of the fabric of the existing IT and DevOps ecosystems. This innovation will further reduce the need for additional sensors in the stack. Octarine capabilities will also integrate and leverage the VMware Tanzu platform, including current investments in Service Mesh and Open Policy Agent.

“Acquiring Octarine will enable us to further expand VMware’s intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud,” said Patrick Morley, GM and Senior Vice President, Security Business Unit, VMware. “This, combined with native integrations with Tanzu, vSphere, NSX and VMware Cloud Foundation, will create what we believe is a unique and compelling solution for intrinsically securing workloads. And, with the addition of our AppDefense capabilities merged into the platform, we can fundamentally transform how workloads are better secured.”