RedHat on Monday announced the availability of Red Hat Applications Foundations, a set of application services that together with RedHat OpenShift, aims to accelerate development and app delivery across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The company said Red Hat Application Foundations will serve as a toolkit for companies looking to quickly build and integrate application and data services as part of their application and infrastructure modernization strategy. It has been optimized for OpenShift, RedHat’s popular Kubernetes platform
Melinda Marks, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, explained that as developers use cloud services and CI/CD pipelines to work quickly, leveraging microservices architectures and containers, and pulling code from various sources, it’s often difficult to ensure that the applications that are being quickly delivered are secure across all of their components.
“This puts a strain on security teams if applications deployed have coding defects resulting in security vulnerabilities,” Marks said. “It’s better if the developers have the right tools to safely build their applications. Red Hat is providing a tool kit with Red Hat Applications Foundations to help developers more efficiently build their applications with the right components to help scale security for faster development cycles.”
Lara Greden, research director, PaaS, cloud platforms for developers of modern and edge applications at IDC, added that Red Hat has addressed two important vectors in the market: One is the commitment to enabling streamlined development in a multi-cloud world, which requires automation and baked-in security. The other is a focus on enabling developers with ease-of-access to the breadth of application components needed for cloud native application development.
“Red Hat’s strategy is to do this in a way that also embraces the ecosystem, which is important because developers will naturally find their way to best-of-breed,” Greden said.
Hank Schless, senior manager, security solutions at Lookout, said developers are expected to constantly push out new updates with the latest and greatest functionality. Schless said if security isn’t part of the development process, then it often gets overlooked or seen as a hinderance to getting updates out quickly enough.
“One of the biggest advantages of cloud-delivered software is that an update can be pushed to the entire user base to fix these issues,” Schless said. “Before the cloud, vulnerabilities could exist for months or years. Usually, attackers use the lack of security in an app to get to valuable personal information or bypass native security capabilities on the device. This is why it’s so important to secure all of your smartphones, tablets, and computers with additional security software that can stop threat actors who try to exploit known and unknown vulnerabilities.”
