The devastating cyberattack was preventable—it exploited a Windows vulnerability known as EternalBlue that Microsoft identified and fixed on March 14, 2017. Because server-level patching is executed using traditional techniques, WannaCry affected companies and organizations that did not apply the security patch for this vulnerability in an automated, timely manner.
Starting today, Pivotal Cloud Foundry® (PCF) customers can increase the power of their platform automation with the availability of Concourse for Pivotal Cloud Foundry , the system for setting up and running continuous integration and delivery pipelines in and for Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Pivotal patches critical vulnerabilities anywhere in the platform—embedded operating system, middleware, Cloud Foundry component—typically within 48 hours of a fix becoming available. With Concourse for PCF, customers can set up pipelines that detect and deploy that patch to their PCF installations automatically, often with zero downtime.
Rigorous automated testing and continuously updated platforms improve a company's security posture while also freeing up operators to focus on delivering new features to application developers—allowing IT organizations to focus on creating value-added software for their customers.
Some of the top-line benefits for Pivotal Cloud Foundry customers include:
Heightened Security
Pivotal Cloud Foundry users can repair vulnerable operating systems and application stacks consistently within hours of patch availability. In addition to leveraging Concourse to update the platform itself, Concourse users can continuously deploy their own applications.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s ability to repair vulnerable operating systems and application stacks consistently within hours of patch availability allows organizations to adopt a “faster is safer” approach to cybersecurity with the three Rs of enterprise security: (1) Rotate the credentials frequently so they are only useful for short periods of time, (2) Repave servers and applications from a known good state to cut down on the amount of time an attack can live, and (3) Repair vulnerable software as soon as updates are available.
Ultimately, PCF customers can load, test, and apply security patches to their entire cloud platform with complete automation.
Platform Automation
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used by developers at the world’s largest companies, who support tens of thousands of applications that run their multi-billion dollar businesses. At Pivotal, we apply this new approach to our own operations, which allows us to maintain Pivotal Web Services® (PWS) and the thousands of applications running on it with two IT operators—with Concourse, our customers can now easily operate applications running their company with the same level of efficiency.
Concourse removes the need to scale operations teams as the number of onboarded application development teams increase. This automation not only speeds up incident response times but also provides a consistent experience for developers across Pivotal Cloud Foundry environments—e.g., across public clouds and on-prem, across development, test, and production, etc.
