Bridging the gap: Secure virtual and container workloads with Red Hat OpenShift and Palo Alto Networks

Bridging the gap: Secure virtual and container workloads with Red Hat OpenShift and Palo Alto Networks The operational tension A strategic optimization Red Hat OpenShift optimization with Prisma AIRS Strategic implications Use case: workload migration with embedded security Use case: centralized management and policy uniformity Implementation notes Final thoughts 15 reasons to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization About the author Simon Seagrave More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share While migrating virtual or containerized workloads between environments may seem straightforward, teams responsible for managing system uptime, policy enforcement, and securing east-west traffic, often find it to be a complex process. Subtle differences in hypervisor behavior, inconsistent policy application, and blind spots in traffic flows can introduce risks that aren’t always obvious, until it’s almost too late. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization combined with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series software firewalls helps address these complexities where they typically arise. OpenShift Virtualization streamlines the modernization and lifecycle management of VM-based workloads within a Kubernetes-native platform. VM-Series complements this by bringing consistent, application-aware network security to virtualized environments, helping teams enforce policy and maintain visibility even as infrastructure evolves. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift integrated with Prisma AIRS™ enables customers to deploy AI-powered threat prevention for runtime network protection across containerized workloads running on OpenShift clusters. Many enterprises operate in hybrid environments by necessity, not choice. Existing virtualization investments coexist with containerized applications, and teams are expected to support both with equal reliability. The operational challenge is not only bridging these domains but doing so without fragmenting security policy, tooling, or visibility. Today, workloads migrate between private clouds, public clouds, or across datacenters and have different form factors of the workload including physical, virtual, and containerized. While this provides significant flexibility to the customers, it compounds the issue of enforcing uniform security posture, and migrations become moments of risk. Policy gaps, inconsistent segmentation, or east-west blind spots can create undetected lateral movement paths for threats.