ISSUE 170: Firewall Sale

“To start a project, you need three things: a read me, a license file and a code of conduct.”

Wiebe de Roos, a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) consultant and engineer for ABN Amro, one of The Netherlands largest banks with over 22,000 employees, joined the company when the bank was beginning its shift to CI/CD through its DevOps/DevSecOps initiative. The reasons management decided its developer teams needed to make the shift included late deliveries and less-than-stellar innovation on the application front. “The teams were not really mature,” Roos said.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference held in Barcelona at the end of May, Roos was joined by ABN Amro’s secure coding and AI team lead Dominik de Smit. They spoke with the host, Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, about ABN Amro’s CI/CD, DevOps and DevSecOps journey. They also discussed the tools the development teams use, such as those Twistlock provides for containers and cloud native security, and how they have also played an essential role in meeting the real-world development, operational and security challenges they face.

Firewall Sale

Is there a run on cloud native security firms?

Last we saw enterprise security software company Palo Alto Networks announce its intent to purchase container security provider Twistlock and serverless security provider PureSec. Palo Alto already has put up a considerable portfolio of security tools, including threat prevention services, firewalls, endpoint protection, the Cortex continuous integration platform and the Prisma cloud security suite (the last of which it plans to roll in technologies from both Twistlock and PureSec). 

Palo Alto is finding, as we already know in the cloud native community, that container and serverless security comes with their own unique attack vectors, and require at least some new tech and domain-specific expertise. As you may know, Twistlock offers a truly comprehensive cloud native security platform, providing holistic coverage across hosts, containers, and serverless in a single platform. Twistlock, which Palo Alto plans to purchase for $410 million, is cloud native and API enabled. PureSec (estimated purchase price between $60 and $70 million) enables its customers to build and maintain secure and reliable serverless applications.

As Kubernetes works itself into the marketplace, the traditional security software vendors know they have to do something to meet customer demands. This is why industry observers are predicting more such acquisitions. “It’s clear that every major IT vendor is considering its cloud native strategy. VMware acquired Heptio, NetApp acquired StackPointCloud, Microsoft invested in Aqua Security … the list goes on,” Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of cloud native visibility and security platform Sysdig, told The New Stack. “Add to this the fact that every major cloud provider is retooling their offerings to provide development and operations capabilities for Kubernetes and containers, and you can imagine how things will evolve.”

As TechCrunch reporter Ron Miller pointed out (registration required), over $1.5 billion was spent on such acquisitions recently. He also pointed to FireEye buying Verodin for $250 million, and Insight Partners investing $780 million in threat intelligence company Recorded Future.

The messages from all these investments is obvious: If cloud native computing does make its way deep into the enterprise, then cloud native security will be required as well.

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