CrowdStrike is excited to bring new capabilities to platform engineering and operations teams that manage hybrid cloud infrastructure, including on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift.
Most organizations operate on hybrid cloud1, deployed to both private data centers and public clouds. In these environments, manageability and security can become challenging as the technology stack diverges among various service providers. While using “the right tool for the job” can accelerate delivery for IT and DevOps teams, security operations teams often lack the visibility needed to protect all aspects of the environment. CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security combines single-agent and agentless approaches to comprehensively secure modern applications whether they are deployed in the public cloud, on-premises or at the edge.
In response to the growing need for IT and security operations teams to protect hybrid environments, CrowdStrike was thrilled to be a sponsor of this year’s Red Hat Summit — the premier enterprise open source event for IT professionals to learn, collaborate and innovate on technologies from the data center and public cloud to the edge and beyond.
Securing the Linux core of hybrid cloud
While both traditional and cloud-native applications are often deployed to the Linux operating system, specific Linux distributions, versions and configurations pose a challenge to operations and security teams alike. In a hybrid cloud environment, organizations require visibility into all Linux instances, whether they are deployed on-premises or in the cloud. But for many, this in-depth visibility can be difficult to achieve.
Now, administrators using Red Hat Insights to manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux fleet across clouds can now more easily determine if any of their Falcon sensors are running in Reduced Functionality Mode. CrowdStrike has worked with Red Hat to build custom recommendations for the Red Hat Insights Advisor service, helping surface important security configuration issues directly to IT operations teams. These recommendations are available in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console and require no additional configuration.
Figure 1. The custom recommendation for Red Hat Insights Advisor identifies systems where the Falcon sensor is in Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM).
Security and operations teams must also coordinate on the configuration and risk posture of Linux instances. To assist, CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management identifies vulnerabilities and remediation steps across Linux distributions so administrators can reduce risk. Exposure Management is now extending Center for Internet Security (CIS) hardening checks to Linux, beginning with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Falcon platform’s single-agent architecture allows these cyber hygiene capabilities to be enabled with no additional agents to install and minimal system impact.
Even with secure baseline configurations, ad-hoc questions about the state of the fleet can often arise. CrowdStrike Falcon® for IT allows operations teams to ask granular questions about the status and configuration of their endpoints. Built on top of the osquery framework already popular with IT teams, and with seamless execution through the existing Falcon sensor, Falcon for IT helps security and operations consolidate more capabilities onto the Falcon platform and reduce the number of agents deployed to each endpoint.
Operationalizing Kubernetes security
While undeniably popular with DevOps teams, Kubernetes can be a daunting environment to protect for security teams unfamiliar with it. To make the first step easier for organizations using Red Hat and AWS’ jointly managed Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), CrowdStrike and AWS have collaborated to develop prescriptive guidance for deploying the Falcon sensor to ROSA clusters. The guide documents installation and configuration of the Falcon operator on ROSA clusters, as well as best practices for scaling to large environments. This guidance now has limited availability. Contact your AWS or CrowdStrike account teams to review the guidance.
Figure 2. Architecture diagram of the Falcon operator deployed to a Red Hat OpenShift Service on an AWS cluster, covered in more depth in the prescriptive guidance document.
Furthermore, CrowdStrike’s certification of its Falcon operator for Red Hat OpenShift has achieved “Level 2 — Auto Upgrade” status. This capability simplifies upgrades between minor versions of the operator, which improves manageability for platform engineering teams that may manage many OpenShift clusters across multiple cloud providers and on-premises. These teams can then use OpenShift GitOps to manage the sensor version in a Kubernetes-native way, consistent with other DevOps applications and infrastructure deployed to OpenShift.
One of the components deployed by the Falcon operator is a Kubernetes admission controller, which security administrators can use to enforce Kubernetes policies. In addition to checking pod configurations for risky settings, the Falcon admission controller can now block the deployment of container images that violate image policies, including restrictions on a specific base image, package name or vulnerability score. The Falcon admission controller’s deploy-time enforcement complements the build-time image assessment that Falcon Cloud Security already supported.
A strong and secure foundation for hybrid cloud
Whether you are managing 10 or 10,000 applications and services, the Falcon platform protects traditional and cloud-native workloads on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge and everywhere in between — with one agent and one console. Click here to learn more about how the Falcon platform can help protect Red Hat environments.
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