Red Hat Inc. is betting that enterprises will be interested in its ability to secure hybrid cloud applications better with a new and more advanced iteration of its Red Hat OpenShift platform.

The enhanced offering is complemented by a suite of new, fully managed cloud services that are designed to work with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a cloud-hosted, managed version of the OpenShift platform that runs on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Announced today at Red Hat Summit, the Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus offering is meant to enable enterprises to adopt what’s known as the DevSecOps methodology, which is a mindset that preaches how everyone within an organization is responsible for information technology security. In a nutshell, DevSecOps involves baking security into every step of the software development workflow.

With today’s release, Red Hat now offers three separate editions of OpenShift, which is an open-source, integrated development environment that’s used to build and deploy container applications managed using the Kubernetes orchestration tool. OpenShift is popular because it makes it simple to manage and automate large numbers of containers that host the components of modern apps.

The basic version is Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, while Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform adds more developer and operations services as well as advanced features to deploy and modernize apps. Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is the most comprehensive of the three, adding more advanced security features, “day 2” management capabilities and a global container registry, Red Hat said. Slated for release in the second quarter, it’s targeted at enterprises that need a more consistent way to implement security in their apps, regardless of where they live in the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus brings new features including Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes that is derived from Red Hat’s acquisition of StackRox Inc. in January. StackRox’s technology was all about continuous advanced threat detecting in cloud-native applications and containers.

It worked by deploying components for policy enforcement and data collection directly to the underlying infrastructure. Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes does something similar, providing what Red Hat says is “deep system-level data collection and analysis” as well as “more than 60 security policies out-of-the-box that can be applied and enforced from the time that apps are built to when they are deployed and running.”

The other benefit of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus’ security focus is that it enables organizations to implement DevSecOps, by integrating declarative security into developer’s tooling and workflows.

Ashesh Badani, senior vice president of cloud platforms at Red Hat, said enterprises that are using Kubernetes and containers at production scale need better tools and strategies to manage those deployments.

“Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus further extends the already robust capabilities of OpenShift to provide the greater security, oversight and governance that organizations need to more securely build, run and manage applications consistently at scale across the hybrid cloud and the modern application lifecycle,” he said.

To that end, the platform also adds Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes that enables better end-to-end visibility, management and control of Kubernetes cluster across hybrid and multicloud environments. Finally, it’s the first release of Red Hat OpenShift that integrates natively with Red Hat Quay, which serves as a private registry for companies to securely store and distribute their container images across any kind of infrastructure.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that today’s update is all about Red Hat trying to differentiate its Kubernetes platform from a wide field of competitor offerings.

“Kubernetes is a competitive space and the various players need to stand out with value added services,” Mueller said. “Today it is RedHat’s turn, launching RedHat OpenShift Platform Plus, which is really just an upgraded OpenShift with additional capabilities. Security is the major focus, but it is good to see the visibility improvements and container registry through the Quay integration.”

As for the new cloud services that work with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a cloud-based version of the three OpenShift offerings, these are meant to help mitigate the operational complexities of running extremely complex IT environments, the company said.

They include Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, available in preview now, which the company said makes it easier for developer teams to incorporate event streaming data into their applications. Data streams serve as the backbone for capturing, communicating and processing events in distributed application architectures, Red Hat said. By incorporating this real-time data, applications will be able to create more immediate digital experiences wherever a service is delivered.

Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, meanwhile, is said to enable faster development, training and testing of machine learning models without worrying about the associated infrastructure needed to do this. It helps by implementing common data science tools that serve as the foundation of an AI-as-a-service platform that can be integrated with select partner cloud services, Red Hat said. Red Hat OpenShift Data Science is available now in beta as an add-on to OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.

Finally, there’s Red Hat OpenShift API Management, also available now on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. It provides full application programming interface lifecycle management that makes it easier to build, manage and scale up microservices-based applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, Red Hat said. In addition, it can help companies to build their own API management programs that can be used to control access, monitor usages and share common APIs.

RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady said the new managed cloud services would help enterprises reduce the operational burden of developer teams.

“This allows the focus to be on delivering business value, rather than spending valuable resources on infrastructure management,” O’Grady said. “With Red Hat OpenShift and a curated, tightly integrated set of services that runs across multiple clouds, Red Hat intends to allow its customers to do just that.”

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