Designated Support Engineer - Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat: AI is turning sovereignty into an Australian business issue. Grant Titmus, Journalist | Published 8 Oct 2026 The Australian Government is grappling with accelerating AI investment and adoption along with balancing the country's sovereignty. On his recent trip to the US, Defence Minister and Deputy PM Richard Marles said AI represented the most significant risk to Australia's sovereignty since World War II. "This is an opportunity for us to be collaborating on one of the most significant technologies that humanity has ever seen, and in doing so, make sure that we are at the forefront of the use of this technology and the sovereignty associated with it, particularly in respect of our national security," Marles said while at The Pentagon. iTWire attended open source enterprise solutions leader Red Hat's annual Summit Connect in Melbourne with its push around hybrid cloud, open source, portability and avoiding locking in one vendor reflects some of the same sovereignty concerns emerging in Australia's AI debate. iTWire discussed the sovereignty issue with Red Hat senior vice president and chief product officer Ashesh Badani and Enzo Compagnoni, Red Hat's regional vice president and general manager for Australia and New Zealand. Both agreed that sovereignty had not been a widely discussed issue until recently. The shift represents a significant change with sovereignty, in previous years, largely a concern for government, defence and intelligence organisations. Watch itwire's interview with Red Hat's ANZ general manager and chief product officer: "It has become a more prevalent discussion in Australia. We've got government customers where sovereignty is always there, but it is now coming up much more in the private sector," Compagnoni said. Badani said that for many parts of the world and for many industries, the intersection between geopolitics and technology have never been closer. "Sovereignty is no longer a nice to have. It's a critical pillar for many organisations and their ongoing future success. Evolving AI laws, data residency rules, and sector-specific regulations are being rewritten for a world that it was never initially built for. "For us at Red Hat, the answer to this conundrum is always freedom and choice, delivered by open source, because that is where you really gain control of these dimensions." Sigourney Miller, Red Hat's Director of Business Value Practice, told the summit that IDC had commissioned a report earlier this year around sovereignty which showed the primary driver for sovereign cloud adoption is now operational resilience. According to the research, operational resilience was cited by about 50% of organisations as a primary driver of sovereign cloud adoption. "From a Red Hat point of view, we do believe that open source is the solution, and with 40% of organisations citing integration complexity and higher costs as major adoption hurdles, an open source first model we believe really helps you take advantage of the opportunity in front of you in a sovereign and safe way. It also helps you to prevent vendor lock-in," Miller said. As part of the opening keynote at the summit, Shane Bennett, group leader cyber integration at the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), was interviewed on stage. DSTG is the science and technology arm of the Department of Defence and operates networks ranging from unclassified environments through to extremely air-gapped classified systems. Bennett said DSTG had undergone a rapid technology change about 12 months ago after being asked to migrate away from particular vendor platforms. The move was not simply about removing a vendor; DSTG also had to ensure it could continue working with its international partners. "Some of the challenges we found were bringing people along for the journey - not just the users but the administrators of the networks. They had spent entire careers with one style of design and we needed them to shift their perceptions around change." The DSTG project has expanded beyond Australia. Bennett said the organisation had led the way among its Five Eyes partners, with New Zealand looking to replicate the approach and discussions also taking place with Canada and the UK. The organisation initially deployed the new approach across a small number of systems and plans to extend it across the 10 to 15 networks managed by Bennett's team. For Red Hat, the DSTG example illustrates why open source can play a role in sovereign infrastructure. The sovereignty issue is becoming even more significant as organisations deploy AI, with Red Hat seeing customers consider where AI workloads run, who controls the infrastructure and how they maintain security and resilience. AI is also creating a new cost-management challenge. Badani said the company was increasingly discussing "tokenomics" with customers as organisations attempt to control the cost of AI consumption. He said that although the average cost of tokens is falling, overall consumption is rising as companies use more AI applications. Organisations are consequently beginning to introduce AI budgets and controls, with Red Hat itself moving from broad experimentation towards greater management of AI expenditure. "If you incentivise your users to just consume tokens, they're going to consume a lot of tokens," Badani said. He compared the development with cloud computing, where uncontrolled consumption eventually led to the emergence of FinOps disciplines designed to manage expenditure. Badani said the growing use of AI was contributing to the challenge because attackers had access to increasingly sophisticated tools for discovering potential exploits. Red Hat's response includes Lightwell, its collaboration with IBM to help customers address vulnerabilities in open-source software components beyond Red Hat's own products. Compagnoni said conversations with Australian CISOs had increased dramatically, with the focus shifting from simply detecting vulnerabilities to how quickly they could be remediated. "It's no longer about just the detection; it's also about time to remediation," he said. For Red Hat, the next phase of enterprise AI will require more than increasingly capable models. Badani says organisations will need infrastructure that gives them control over their data and workloads while providing the flexibility to change technology as requirements evolve. And as AI becomes embedded in Australia's critical infrastructure and business systems, the sovereignty question becomes less about where technology is hosted and more about whether organisations retain the ability to control, move and secure it when circumstances change.

"Red Hat" confirms UAE market strategy and showcases its solutions at the "Artificial Intelligence 2026" exhibition * Tuesday, October 6, 2026 10:19 PM * One-minute read Abu Dhabi, October 6 / WAM / Mohamed Youssef, regional marketing director for "Red Hat" in the UAE, affirmed that the country represents a strategic market for the company, which continues its growth and supports institutions in the aviation, banking and financial services, and energy sectors with artificial intelligence solutions, software infrastructure, and open-source technologies. Youssef said in a statement to the Emirates News Agency "WAM" during his participation for the second consecutive year in the World Artificial Intelligence Summit and Exhibition "Abu Dhabi 2026" that the company is showcasing solutions that enable customers to build and scale artificial intelligence solutions flexibly, in line with the UAE's digital transformation trends. He pointed to multiple partnerships for the company in the country, including "G42", to provide technical solutions that enable systems to operate efficiently within hybrid cloud environments from different providers, enhancing institutions' ability to manage their solutions flexibly without relying on a single provider. * Science and technology * United Arab Emirates (ARE) * Local activities * Artificial intelligence world

Zscaler collaborates with IBM and Red Hat to protect private applications from frontier ai-powered threats. New collaboration combines Zscaler Autonomous Application Shield with Lightwell from IBM and Red Hat to help organizations reduce exposure between vulnerability disclosure and patch deployment through inline protection and validated remediation. October 05, 2026 08:00 ET | Source: Zscaler, Inc. SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the cybersecurity platform for the AI era, today announced a collaboration with IBM and Red Hat to help organizations protect private applications during the period between vulnerability disclosure and patch deployment. The collaboration combines Zscaler Autonomous Application Shield, delivered through the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange(TM) security platform, with Lightwell from IBM and Red Hat to deliver adaptive, application-specific protection with validated software remediation in a single coordinated response. "Lightwell helps keep open source safe by patching and fixing these vulnerabilities at machine speed. Collaborating with partners like Zscaler brings..." "As attackers weaponize newly disclosed vulnerabilities faster than enterprises can respond, organizations need a way to protect private applications..." "Our collaboration with IBM and Red Hat brings together inline, application-specific protection and validated remediation to help customers reduce risk during..." "AI is shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and vulnerability exploitation. A window that was months or weeks is now hours and minutes," The economics of exploitation have shifted. Capabilities that once required elite skills and weeks of manual effort are now widely available, and attackers are weaponizing newly disclosed vulnerabilities faster than enterprise patch cycles can respond. According to Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report, the mean time to exploit a vulnerability has fallen below zero, meaning vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited before a public patch exists. Patching remains necessary, but on its own it can no longer keep pace. Organizations need protection that can be applied at machine speed while remediation is prepared and deployed. This collaboration extends Zscaler's protection-first operating model for private applications, which assumes a remediation window will always exist and builds resilience around it: hide applications with Zscaler Private Access(TM)(ZPA(TM)) so they are harder to discover and target, segment access with Autonomous User-to-App Segmentation so a foothold does not become broad reachability, and shield reachable applications with Autonomous Application Shield so exploit attempts are stopped inline while the root cause is fixed. By uniting Zscaler Autonomous App Shield with Lightwell, the collaboration provides customers a coordinated path from immediate protection to durable fix. Operating through the Zero Trust Exchange, Zscaler App Connectors continuously perform safe assessments of each private application's exposure points and vulnerabilities. The Zscaler cloud individually evaluates each application, ensuring only necessary protections are applied. When a new vulnerability emerges, adaptive protections can be applied inline and in real time, without waiting for a patch. Through this collaboration, Lightwell helps Zscaler defend its customers from potential cyber threats, with Zscaler blocking exploit attempts immediately at the network level. Lightwell then provides validated remediations for affected open source software, enabling customers to fix the underlying flaw at the source. "As attackers weaponize newly disclosed vulnerabilities faster than enterprises can respond, organizations need a way to protect private applications immediately while fixes are being prepared and deployed," said Joby Menon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Zscaler. "Our collaboration with IBM and Red Hat brings together inline, application-specific protection and validated remediation to help customers reduce risk during that gap." Through this collaboration, Zscaler, IBM, and Red Hat will deliver integrated capabilities across the application security lifecycle, addressing critical needs including: * Exposure Discovery: Providing a current understanding of a private application's actual risk profile, updated as fast as applications change, rather than relying on periodic scans. * Preemptive, Application-Specific Protection: Bridging the gap between vulnerability and patching. Applying only the protections a given application needs during the gap between disclosure and patching, reducing exposure while remediation is underway and avoiding one-size-fits-all policy noise. * Machine-Speed Response: Deploying protections inline and in real time when a new vulnerability emerges, informed by global threat intelligence from across Zscaler's worldwide customer base. * Validated Source-Level Remediation: Delivering tested software fixes through Lightwell so organizations can resolve the underlying vulnerability, with advisory and deployment support to prioritize and validate protections across complex environments. "AI is shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and vulnerability exploitation. A window that was months or weeks is now hours and minutes," said Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Lightwell, Red Hat. "Lightwell helps keep open source safe by patching and fixing these vulnerabilities at machine speed. Collaborating with partners like Zscaler brings Lightwell's capabilities to the forefront of enterprise networks, mitigating potential vulnerabilities head-on while patches are applied to critical systems." Autonomous Application Shield is currently available through an Early Access Program. Availability, capabilities, and timing of the collaboration described herein are subject to change. For a deeper dive into how Zscaler is helping protect against AI threats, please visit this blog. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on our management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to our management. These forward-looking statements include the expected performance and benefits of Zscaler Autonomous Application Shield and its collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, including the delivery of adaptive, machine-speed protection for private applications. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. A significant number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this press release, including those factors related to Zscaler's ability to achieve partner and customer adoption of Autonomous Application Shield and the collaboration described herein. Additional risks and uncertainties are set forth in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on September 3, 2026, which is available on our website at ir.zscaler.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on the limited information currently available to Zscaler as of the date hereof, which is subject to change, and Zscaler will not necessarily update the information, even if new information becomes available in the future. About Zscaler Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) accelerates digital transformation so customers can be more agile, efficient, resilient, and secure. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange(TM) platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Distributed across 200+ public data centers globally and thousands of private sites at the edge, the SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange is the world's largest in-line cloud security platform. Media Contacts Nick Gonzalez, Director of Public Relations, [email protected]