Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (StackRox)

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (RHACS) is Red Hat’s commercial Kubernetes-native container and cloud-security platform, built on and powered by StackRox, the Kubernetes security company Red Hat acquired in early 2021. StackRox itself was founded in 2014 in Mountain View, California, and built a platform for vulnerability management, configuration and compliance, network segmentation, and runtime threat detection purpose-built for containerized and Kubernetes environments, addressing risks such as misconfigured cluster RBAC, overly permissive network policy, and unpatched container images that traditional host- or network-centric security tools weren’t designed to see.

Red Hat closed its acquisition of StackRox on February 25, 2021, for an undisclosed sum reported by multiple outlets to exceed $100 million, and in May 2022 open-sourced the underlying StackRox project, continuing to sell the hardened, supported version as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, now bundled into and cross-sold alongside OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform. This open-source-upstream, commercial-downstream model gives RHACS both a community-vetted codebase and enterprise support/SLA guarantees, though it also means its roadmap and go-to-market are now entirely subordinate to Red Hat’s, and ultimately IBM’s, since Red Hat’s 2019 acquisition, broader hybrid-cloud strategy rather than operating as an independent company.