Security Implications of IBM-Red Hat Merger Unclear

The full implications of IBM's planned $34 billion purchase of Red Hat could take several years to play out. But from a security perspective, don't expect the merger to change things very much for enterprises and the open source community, several industry experts said this week.

In a surprise move, IBM on Sunday announced its intention to acquire all issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat at $190 per share in cash. The deal represents a value of roughly $34 billion and is by far the biggest technology acquisition that IBM has made in its history. In fact, the planned purchase is one of the largest technology deals ever, behind Dell's mammoth $67 billion acquisition of EMC in 2016.

Red Hat is expected to significantly bolster IBM's capabilities in the cloud space, especially in hybrid-cloud environments. The two companies have partnered with each other on Linux initiatives for some 20 years, including most recently on hybrid-cloud and Kubernetes container orchestration technologies. Many major companies looking to leverage open source software and components currently have Red Hat Linux running on data center servers. Red Hat's OpenShift container application platform, which combines Docker and Kubernetes container technologies, is popular within the developer community and organizations looking to develop applications capable of running in multicloud and hybrid-cloud environments.