VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a quick overview of your company?

Markus Strauss:  Runecast was founded almost eight years ago based on one core idea: surely there's a better way to do this? Runecast wanted to help IT System Admins take and maintain control of their environments. Our founders were admins for massive VMware estates and wanted to find a way to prevent and automate some of their day to day challenges. As many of your readers will know, manually managing security compliance, patching, upgrades, compliance with best practices and guidelines, along with juggling audits is an impossible task for complex hybrid cloud environments. There's now more information available than ever before and it's impossible to parse it all without the help of automation. That's where Runecast comes in. We provide a single, powerful AI-driven platform for proactive visibility of vulnerability management, security compliance and operational stability in hybrid cloud environments. We're making it easy for Operations and Security teams to get on top of their workloads and get back to the value-adding tasks which we know they want to be focusing on.

VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?

Strauss:  We've grown from offering simple VMware insights and automation to becoming one of the main Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms available. We offer comprehensive security standards assessment, configuration and vulnerability management for VMware environments, along with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or containerized deployments like Kubernetes, keeping our customers secure and compliant throughout the entire cloud migration journey.

We're focused on making sure that all your workloads are protected and are now helping DevOps and DevSecOps teams. Shifting security efforts further left into development has been a key focus for us, as this reduces security risks before workloads hit production and reduces operational overheads from day one.

VMblog: How can attendees of the event find you? What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth?

Strauss: Attendees can find us at booth 1702, just over from the L8 lounge. We'll have our team there, which is the best reason to go and visit any booth: the people. Our CEO Stan Markov, along with co-founders Ched Smokovic and Ionut Radu will be there and also myself with a number of Runecast engineers. We’ll have Lego figures, stickers and much more swag available, we even have a competition to win some Apple AirPods Pro and a Meta Quest 2 VR Headset! And of course a special announcement or teaser of what's coming next from Runecast.

VMblog:  Do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Strauss:  One of our engineers, Tomas Odehnal, will be delivering a vBrownBag session on managing configuration drift in the hybrid cloud. Configuration drift is a problem that we know admins face: why does something stop working when it was just working fine yesterday? What's changed and how can we get our configurations back to a known good baseline? Tomas will be talking all about how to spot it and stop it.

VMblog:  VMworld has typically been a launching platform for new products.  At VMware Explore, will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak peek?

Strauss:  We have a history of launching new versions at previous VMworlds. We've just expanded Runecast hybrid cloud coverage with Google Cloud Platform support, and for Dev and DevOps teams, Runecast now integrates directly with the Kubernetes Admission Controller as well as CI/CD Platforms such as Jenkins. That allows admins to connect container deployments from any platform that supports webhooks, directly to Runecast's image scanning.

On top of that, we also have something new brewing in the background. Runecast wants to give back to the community by providing a free edition of Runecast. Sysadmins may look forward to a free version of Runecast soon. The idea behind the free version of Runecast will be to offer an essential level of help to IT teams in industries that may not be so heavily regulated, for example industries that don't need to comply with various security standards. We're planning to launch this during the later stages of 2022.

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