Last month, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) organized a one-day software bill of materials (SBoM)-centric conference, both amusingly and aptly entitled SBoM-a-Rama. It was a hybrid event allowing for both in-person and remote participation; I chose the latter. As a long-term security practitioner, I’ve been observing the development of this field with great enthusiasm, but always from the periphery.

One day a few years ago, Sushil Kumar, our head of DevOps, was worried. A key admin on his team in charge of private and public cloud infrastructure had just given notice that he was leaving in two weeks. Even after scheduling a knowledge transfer session to other team admins, Kumar saw that their operations would be at risk. And he was right. Kumar and his team spent the next 18 months dealing with the fallout.

Alfredo García, manager R&D, VMware contributed to this blog post. VMware Application Catalog now includes enterprise support for Sealed Secrets, enabling customers to add an asymmetric cryptography-based protection to their Kubernetes Secrets stored in shared repositories.

As we acknowledge Istio's graduation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it's important to note that it’s not just a momentous occasion for Istio, but for the entire cloud native community. This milestone marks a significant growth trajectory for Istio and paves the way for future innovation and success in the years to come. In the realm of microservices, the significance of Istio's role cannot be overstated.

Businesses today are prioritizing software agility to remain competitive in a rapidly changing world. However, the perks of having access to different clouds, tools, and methodologies can also bring along with it layers of complexity. As the cloud native landscape continues to grow, it’s vital that organizations are investing in capabilities that accelerate developer productivity, drive revenue, and maintain a competitive edge.

Application modernization has been all the rage for years, but we’ve seen firsthand here at VMware Tanzu Labs that most organizations struggle to achieve the outcomes they initially hoped for. Modernization complexity goes far beyond technology, especially within larger organizations that contain dozens of business units, many stakeholders, and multiple—sometimes conflicting—priorities. Many of the organizations we work with have experienced these common roadblocks.

VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized hub for simplified, multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management. It helps platform teams take control of their Kubernetes clusters with visibility across environments by allowing users to group clusters and perform operations, such as applying policies, on these groupings.

There’s no shortage of innovation in the financial services industry. Financial institutions have always placed a high value on innovation, as demonstrated by their willingness to fund technology-led initiatives. According to Gartner® Research Inc., “Global enterprise IT spending in the banking and investment services market is forecast to increase by 7.7% in 2023 to $666.5 billion in constant US dollars.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto platform for containerized applications. But it’s a fractured environment and each Kubernetes distribution has their own nuances. Further, much of today’s cloud native software design assumes a healthy Internet connection, which is not always available. What’s missing is a standardized way to deliver applications on top of any Kubernetes, without an Internet connection (also known as air-gapped deployments).

Michael Coté and Marc Zottner co-wrote this article. Legacy software can slow—or even stop—business growth. As organizations hit a legacy wall, they face an unfortunate reality: When IT systems are too old and unchangeable, it’s impossible to transform the way their core business works. In fact, 76 percent of executives say that legacy software is holding them back, according to a Forrester report commissioned by VMware. What does that mean for today’s businesses?