Chef launched a pair of new products designed to help enterprise IT departments manage the security of their diverse workforce from a single console. This angle is becoming increasingly important for organizations grappling with employees being forced to work remotely due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Chef’s most over-arching launch was with its Compliance platform that includes an audit function allowing information security and security operation (SecOps) teams to maintain visibility over the compliance status of their operations. This is done through the use of audit content based on the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) standards that can be tuned for specific needs.

There is also a new Compliance Remediation tool that is targeted at helping infrastructure and operations teams to link their audit and remediation to support continuous compliance in an enterprise.

Chef CTO Corey Scobie explained during a keynote address at the recent ChefConf virtual event that this allows a customer to “close the compliance loop and actually automatically remediate many of the vulnerabilities or compliance challenges that we find in in typical enterprise organizations.”

“What's important about that is by using policy driven automation we can configure rather than have to program with mountains of code for the various different security and compliance policies that you want to implement in your organization,” Scobie said.

Chef also launched its Desktop feature that allows for the management of enterprise IT configuration and compliance from a central location. It includes pre-written configuration code and “highly-curated content” to audit and secure laptop and desktop operating systems like MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

The updates follow up on a significant move by Chef last year to revamp its development, platforms, and go-to-market strategy to more fully embrace the open source community.

The move included Chef developing and releasing all of its software under the Apache 2.0 open source license model. It also moved to build all of its different platforms from the same source code that is distributed to the open source community and will be distributed with commercial license terms.

Chef had previously operated under a “loose open core model” where some of its platforms were open source and some were proprietary.

Chef CEO Barry Crist said that the move toward open source was “working 100%” and that “the path we’ve chosen is performing.”

He explained that the company posted its tenth consecutive year of record revenues in 2019, and that the company started 2020 with strong momentum. This included its best Q1 ever with 100% growth over the previous year and being “firmly cash flow positive in the first quarter of this year.”

“The products are performing well, the company expects to be both cashflow positive and profitable, which is a really, really important milestone for companies like ours,” Crist said.

However, the company’s current quarter is being hit by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with Crist citing March as having been “highly impacted by COVID.”