Friday Five — August 11, 2017

This week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, the latest version of Red Hat's enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform. Organizations across the globe, like Copel Telecom, are turning towards cloud-native applications as a pathway to digital transformation, but critical IT needs like greater application security, compliance and service consistency must still be answered. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6 helps to address these challenges with a new PCI-DSS applicability guide and fine-grained network policy and control, as well as the introduction of new features designed to deliver consistent applications across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

Open source operating systems could one day be the established norm and the de facto standard way we all use our machines. So where does Linux enjoy a huge established base of deployment? It's in the core enterprise space. This is where Linux is still Linux in the sense that it is open source... but it is 'commercial' open source and that means a few things. Commercial open source is not intended to be 'dynamic' and this means that its libraries, dependencies and internal code structure are essentially locked at the point of deployment. This is a good thing.

Digital transformation is now a CEO priority, because it is a matter of surviving in an increasingly competitive environment – according to Werner Knoblich, senior vice president and general manager EMEA at Red Hat. "We live in a world where if companies don't digitally transform, their bottom lines will not survive. In the future, even today, every single company will differentiate itself over its competition through digital assets."

As enterprises increase adoption of containers, they also risk increasing the number of mistakes they make with the technology. Given that many companies are still wrapping their heads around the potential of container technology and how to best leverage it, that stands to reason. With that said, however, companies must ensure that they are establishing a solid foundation for security as they continue to identify strategies and workloads that make sense on a container platform. Here are the seven biggest container security mistakes companies are making, and how they can "adjust their sails" to ensure smooth sailing ahead.

Whilst banks may not traditionally have been the fastest movers when it comes to embracing emerging technologies, we are now seeing best practice examples of modernisation coming from these stereotypically risk-averse institutions, which now want to enter a new phase of agility. Whereas previously organisations have tended to be tied to an 80/20 rule when it comes to digital transformation, spending 80 percent of their resource on existing apps and 20 percent on innovation, some financial services institutions are leading the charge in flipping these priorities around, or at least bridging the gap. It is this understanding of how emerging technologies can drive business prosperity, as well as a genuine appetite for innovation, that will be the determining factor when it comes to which institutions prosper in the digital age.