San Francisco, Enterprise software major VMware has announced to acquire early-stage Kubernetes security startup Octarine for an undisclosed sum, which the company will fit in with another security company Carbon Black it bought for $2.1 billion last year.

Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president at VMware's Security Business Unit, said that Octarine's innovative security platform for Kubernetes applications helps simplify DevSecOps and enables cloud native environments to be more secure, from development through runtime.

"Protecting workloads is critical to the security of applications and data inside every organisation. Building Octarine's innovation into the VMware security portfolio will present a major opportunity for our team to further simplify and improve security for our customers," Morley said in a statement on Wednesday.

Just over seven months ago, VMware acquired Carbon Black and announced plans to be a major security provider with its "intrinsic security strategy" – protecting any application, running on any cloud, on any device.

Acquiring Octarine will enable VMware advance intrinsic security for containers (and Kubernetes environments), by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, and via deep hooks and integrations with the VMware Tanzu platform.

In an effort to empower modern SOC teams with the capabilities and context they need to greatly improve both their efficiency and efficacy, VMware also launched a ‘Next-Gen SOC Alliance'.

The alliance features Splunk, IBM Security, Google Cloud's Chronicle, Exabeam, and Sumo Logic integrations with the VMware Carbon Black Cloud to deliver key XDR capabilities.

"The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric," said Tom Barsi, Vice President of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black.