SUSE, a global provider of secure enterprise-grade open source solutions at SUSECON announced new advanced capabilities to help customers accelerate digital transformation as a part of its mission to best secure IT infrastructure and accelerate digital trust.
“Every enterprise must maximise their business resilience to face increasingly sophisticated, and potentially devastating, digital attacks,” says Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer of SUSE. “That means they need to get serious about the security posture of their complex workloads, particularly AI/ML platforms where the protection of customer data is under intense scrutiny. SUSE’s approach to supply chain security along with the announcements allow customers to safely adapt the advantages of a cloud native world and to secure their digital business.”
A new trend report sponsored by SUSE found that more than 88% of respondents reported experiencing more than one cloud-related security incident in the past year. SUSE is in the business of protecting customer data and helping customers stay ahead of threats. To address these concerns, SUSE continues to build out its infrastructure security stack to ensure that customers, partners and open source communities can safely run their application workloads no matter if it’s in the cloud, in the edge or in data-centres to make their business more resilient.
Introducing a new level of Linux security for cloud native
The latest version of SUSE’s enterprise Linux platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) is designed to deliver high-performance computing capabilities which are essential for AI/ML workloads and works in lockstep with Rancher, the adopted Kubernetes platform. SLE 15 SP5 further extends Live Patching capabilities improving business continuity, security and compliance as well as further enhances SLE’s reputation as the industry’s most secure Linux platform with the highest levels of industry certifications. Highlights include:
- Bringing privacy to cloud and edge environments with Confidential Computing – SLE 15 SP5 is the Linux distribution to support the entire spectrum of Confidential Computing, a revolutionary approach to secure customer data being processed in the public cloud and at the Edge. This allows customers to run fully encrypted virtual machines (VMs) no matter the environment. As such, SLES 15 SP5 supports the latest chipset improvement from AMD, Arm, IBM and Intel.
- Securing the SAP infrastructure – SLE 15 SP5 for SAP Applications endorsed by SAP further improves SAP system high availability and faster deployment through enhanced automation and tooling with built-in security features. These enhancements include: Automatic discovery and full observability of servers, cloud instances, SAP HANA databases, SAP S/4HANA, NetWeaver applications and clusters. The latest enhancements in SP5 enable continuous checks of High Availability (HA) configurations with visualisation of potential problems and application of recommended fixes.
- Building resilience for the Linux estates – SUSE manager 4.3.6 now supports more than 15 different Linux distributions including SUSE systems as well as all RHEL 9 variations such as Rocky Linux, Alma Linux and RHEL 9. In early fall, SUSE Manager will be available as a pay-as-you-go offering in the AWS marketplace. This will allow customers to manage infrastructure from the cloud, benefiting from metered usage, scalability and single billing from the cloud provider. For lack of time and in-house skills, customers can take advantage of the new SUSE Manager solutions, including one specifically for customers running SAP workloads, which encompass subscriptions, services, and training speeding time to value.
- Linux for a cloud native world – The SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) brings enterprise Linux forward into modern cloud environments by evolving to a modular Linux, running containerised and virtualised workloads. SUSE ALP is an open source project that provides self-healing and self-management, executing tasks affecting both the OS and the container layer. This allows users to focus on their workloads while abstracting from hardware and applications.
Securing digital enterprise with full lifecycle container security for Kubernetes
SUSE’s report also found that 88% of respondents agreed that their teams would mitigate more workloads in cloud and to the edge if they knew their data couldn’t be tampered with. To ensure customers and partners are protected, Rancher by SUSE builds off its spring 2023 launch with new security-focused product updates that include optimised storage, support for hardened VMs, and improved vulnerability and compliance management.
- Increasing data protection, optimising backup archives and new standards of Kubernetes optimised storage through advanced kernel technology. Longhorn 1.5, a CNCF incubator project of which Rancher is the primary maintainer, will include a preview version of the next-generation Storage Performance Development Kit-based storage engine to improve the input-output performance of persistent volumes used by applications. Other newly released features include the ability to control backing images through container storage interface (CSI) and support for ClusterAutoscaler via Pod Disruption Budgets. These provide operators with more authority over their storage volume costs and deployment support across public cloud Kubernetes.
- Addressing the growing interdependency of containers and VMs across modern infrastructure stacks. SUSE continues to make advancements in simplifying cloud native infrastructure operations with the upcoming release of Harvester 1.2. Starting in July, users will get access to features including support for third-party storage through CSI and the ability to run security-optimised operating systems. Telco and Edge users will also benefit from new dynamic allocations of single root I/O virtualisation functions across workloads and be able to implement a new modular framework that provides better control of operational functions across resource-constrained environments.
In addition, new experimental features include: the implementation of the full Rancher management console built into Harvester for faster deployment of Rancher as well as the release of ‘bare metal mode’ in Harvester, which is designed to give users the ability to run and manage VMs and containers in Kubernetes clusters.
- Improving vulnerability management and simplifying Kubernetes security. The SUSE NeuVector 5.2 update covers enterprise-grade security, vulnerability and compliance management, as well as enterprise scalability and readiness. Key features include common vulnerabilities and exposure database search, NIST 800-53 report mapping which ensures nothing important gets overlooked, Centre for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks, AWS Marketplace integrated billing, token-based API access, customizable login banners (RGS), and Harbor adapter.
SUSE is continuing its investment with cloud service providers across its business. In July, SUSE NeuVector will be available on the AWS Marketplace, giving AWS customers self-service access to full lifecycle, zero-trust container security with pay-as-you-go pricing. NeuVector provides unsurpassed visibility into Kubernetes infrastructure, zero-trust controls to prevent runtime attacks, and supply chain security with vulnerability and compliance scanning and security policy as code. In addition, SUSE NeuVector will also be available on Azure and Google Cloud later this summer.
- Enhancing customer experience with AI. Rancher Prime’s AI Assistant provides automated, accurate, and real-time assistance to customers, and will soon be available via the Rancher Prime customer Slack channel. By leveraging the power of OpenAI and other generative AI technologies, it will have the ability to have a self-serviceable, easy to consume user experience while providing accurate and helpful information.
Improving usability and security in distributed environments
SUSE Edge 2.0 gets support from adding Akri as a component of SUSE Edge for discovering and scheduling workloads for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors, control systems, cameras and more. This allows for managing industrial IoT devices declaratively along with the rest of the stack. This improves IT/OT integrations and reusability of configuration as well as provides a path to a self-healing cluster.
Partner and customer testimonials
“More than 20 years ago, we were the first large industrial company in Germany to build a Linux cluster based on SLES. Since then, open source technology has become a key element of our corporate strategy. The results we have achieved together with SUSE since then show that our decision was exactly right.” says Thomas Kronseder, head of Linux team, MTU Aero Engines AG
“We are pleased to have SUSE as a partner who shares our belief that the telecom industry needs a common blueprint for an industrial-grade cloud-native telco cloud stack covering best in class in security, energy and network performance requirements. This is essential to bring the integration effort for cloud-native network functions down to a level where it becomes feasible for telecom operators to run their CNFs from different vendors on any open source telco cloud stack. We have a unique opportunity to make this a reality through the Linux Foundation Europe hosted project, Sylva, where we are working together to span infrastructure to bare metal and edge, opening the door to new business cases with similar requirements, such as aerospace and others. This will bring huge benefits to the entire ecosystem, unlocking the true benefits of cloud-native technology, with high resilience and better reliability, for operators to achieve new operating models, paving the road towards Network Reliability Engineers (NRE).” says Philippe Ensarguet, VP software engineering, Orange.
“Sustainably and securely meeting cloud computing performance demands requires energy-efficient, specialised processing alongside a strong software ecosystem. Our ongoing work with SUSE to expand the SUSE Linux Enterprise portfolio enables the Arm ecosystem to bring their innovative solutions to market faster on a well-established OS like SLE Micro, with confidence in security proven by its achieving PSA Certified Level 1.” says Andrew Wafaa, senior director of software communities, Arm.
Arm is an example of how SUSE’s partner ecosystem continually adapts to offer timely and effective solutions to customers. SUSE Linux Enterprise has been the Enterprise OS to support the Arm architecture, and now SLE Micro has been PSA Certified. In addition, Arm currently provides support for K3s and Longhorn, with support for RKE2, Rancher Prime and NeuVector by SUSE in the works.
For more information about how SUSE is building digital trust for its customers visit here and to learn the latest on SUSE’s products, register for SUSECON Digital here.
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