VMware announced on Wednesday during its virtual Connect 2020 cybersecurity conference the acquisition of Kubernetes security company Octarine and a new Next-Gen Security Operations Center (SOC) Alliance.
Octarine has developed a platform that provides continuous security and compliance for Kubernetes applications. Following the acquisition of Octarine, VMware plans on integrating that technology into its Carbon Black Cloud solutions to provide more visibility into cloud-native environments, enabling customers to identify and reduce risks posed by attacks and vulnerabilities.
VMware acquired Carbon Black last year for $2.1 billion and the virtualization giant announced the launch of its new Security Business Unit when the acquisition was completed.
Octarine technology will also integrate with VMware Tanzu, which provides an enterprise-grade Kubernetes runtime.
“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, former CEO of Carbon Black and current GM and senior vice president of VMware’s Security Business Unit.
Morley added, “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.”
As for the Next-Gen SOC Alliance, VMware announced that members of the alliance include Splunk, Google Cloud’s Chronicle, IBM Security, Sumo Logic and Exabeam, whose products will be integrated with Carbon Black Cloud to streamline and improve SOC operations.
“The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric,” said Tom Barsi, VP of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black. “In partnership with the industry’s leading SIEM/SOAR players, we’re setting a strong vision for the modern SOC and delivering unprecedented visibility and remediation capabilities across endpoints, networks, workloads, and containers.”
Related: FireEye Acquires Cloud Governance Firm Cloudvisory
Related: Zettaset Launches Software-Defined Encryption for Kubernetes Environments

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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