Morpheus Announces First Zero-Trust Cloud Management Platform and Enhances Hybrid Cloud Automation for DevSecOps

Morpheus Data unveiled today dozens of network security and hybrid cloud updates to its unified orchestration and automation software. 

Morpheus was recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms and scored highest in 3 of the 4 Critical Capabilities Use Cases. Experts and customers have noted Morpheus’ rate of new feature development has outpaced its competition; that momentum continues in the most recent software release which now enables enterprises and government organizations to:

• Protect apps, data, and networks with the first zero-trust cloud management platform including new integration into VMware NSX-T and Unisys Stealth
• Improve agility and enable GitOps with task automation enhancements plus streamline hybrid IT operations via Morpheus GUI, API, and CLI updates
• Reduce risk and eliminate lock-in with expanded coverage for new operating systems, private cloud stacks and public clouds including Google and Oracle

“Flexibility to quickly respond to change is one of the biggest benefits of enterprise DevOps,” says Jay Lyman, Principal Analyst with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the importance of this type of responsiveness.”  Top DevOps barriers identified by 451 Research included technical complexity, cost, and concerns about governance and security.

“The ability of Morpheus to enable self-service private and hybrid clouds in under an hour while unifying people and technology has accelerated customer adoption since the start of the COVID-19 crisis,” says Brad Parks, VP Business Development at Morpheus Data. “Today’s updates enhance efficiency, security, and automation which is more critical than ever as organizations reframe priorities for the rest of the year.”

Protecting hybrid IT with the first zero-trust multi-cloud management platform

Multi-cloud environments are inherently harder to secure because teams and applications are much more distributed resulting in a larger attack surface. A Zero-Trust security model address threats from all sides but requires microsegmentation of the network with granular policy management. Without the right automation, the added overhead of this approach can make it difficult to implement in practice.

Morpheus has now fully integrated VMware NSX-T and Unisys Stealth technology into its cloud automation framework to overcome this operational complexity challenge. These new networking integrations enable microsegmented networks and objects to be created, managed, and consumed dynamically at provision time to dramatically simplify the implementation of zero-trust processes.

For VMware NSX-V and NSX-T, customers can manage transfer zones, distributed firewalls, edge gateways, load balancers and more directly from Morpheus plus securely share these network objects in multi-tenant environments. Unisys Stealth is a software suite trusted by government and commercial organizations to protect sensitive systems from cyber threats with identity-driven microsegmentation. Stealth creates communities of interest (COI) that establish exclusive communication channels between members based on trusted identities. Morpheus can create, manage, and synchronize roles and COIs as well as assign Stealth configuration information at provision time.

Improve agility with GitOps-based task automation and usability enhancements

GitOps is a term now being used to describe processes and tools that empower developers to apply continuous automation principles when performing tasks that typically are part of IT operations. Bridging the gap between Dev and Ops has long been at the heart of the Morpheus platform.

In the most recent release, Morpheus has expanded the ability to dynamically version automation tasks via integration into any Git or Github repository. Task types supporting Git integration include Ansible, Python, Groovy, Shell, Powershell, jRuby and even e-mail based tasks. These tasks can be chained together as phase-based workflows attached to provisioned instances or used to programmatically manage day-2 operations on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis.

In addition to automation updates, the core Morpheus user interface has had a number of updates to improve usability at large scale. Users can now create custom views of application instances across clouds as well as export custom datasets into CSV or JSON for additional analysis including chargeback, showback, project reporting, and more. Navigation has also been streamlined with updates to global search, navigation, and granular sorting of tabular data. With an increasing number of customers managing tens of thousands of workloads, these updates will improve efficiency for development and operations teams

Reduce risk and eliminate lock-in with expanded cloud and OS coverage

Morpheus has the broadest set of supported on-prem and public clouds in the industry; not only common clouds such as VMware, AWS and Azure but also native support out of the box for Google Cloud Platform, Oracle, DigitalOcean and more. This breadth of support enables large enterprise and government organizations to standardize processes to address skills gaps while also eliminating the fear of lock-in.

With this week’s updates, Morpheus has expanded capabilities in a number of on-prem and public clouds to bring consistency to all cloud options. Specifically:

• Microsoft Azure:  Updated support for the latest version of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and added access to premium SSD tiers in provisioned instances.
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Expanded Morpheus tag synchronization, management and continuous tag compliance to now include GCP.
• Oracle Cloud: Morpheus can now synchronize real-time cost data for all instances and cloud resources to provide multi-cloud cost management.
• Microsoft SCVMM: Morpheus has the best SCVMM support of any CMP and now can separate a single cluster into multiple private or multi-tenant clouds.

Lastly, the Morpheus software application has been updated to run on an even broader set of operating systems for additional flexibility. New support for Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Linux 8.x and SUSE Linux is added to existing support for Debian, RHEL 7.x and Ubuntu.