Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today said it acquired cloud security startup Scytale for an undisclosed amount. The deal will boost HPE’s identity management technology as well as its credibility within the open source community.

Scytale’s founders, which include engineers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Duo Security (now owned by Cisco), Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk, were also some of the founding contributors to the SPIFFE and SPIRE open source projects.

SPIFFE (pronounced Spiffy) stands for Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone. It’s an open-source workload identity framework that supports distributed systems deployed in on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments. And its founders modeled it after similar systems at Google, Netflix, and Twitter.

SPIRE (aka the SPIFFE Runtime Environment) is an open source SPIFFE implementation that allows organizations to provision, deploy, and manage SPIFFE identities throughout their heterogeneous production infrastructure.

Scytale, which launched in 2017, was SPIFFE’s primary maintainer, and in 2018 both open source security projects joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as sandbox projects.

But open source in general and open security more specifically are relatively new looks for HPE, and part of what Dave Husak, HPE fellow and GM for the company’s Cloudless Initiative, calls “HPE’s ongoing transformation, part of which is to “embrace and contribute to open source projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and elsewhere.” In a blog about the Scytale acquisition, Husak points to the recent Kubernetes-certified HPE Container Platform, built on two other acquisitions (MapR and BlueData) as proof of this transformation.

“HPE is fully committed to continuing Scytale’s stewardship and contributions to SPIFFE and SPIRE, and these projects will play a fundamental role in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform,” Husak wrote.

Scytale will also advance HPE’s move toward delivering everything as-a-service by 2022 because zero-trust security plays a fundamental role in cloud-delivered services. To this end, HPE plans to incorporate SPIFFE and SPIRE across its portfolio.

“State-of-the-art cryptographic-identity technology will play a critical role in enterprise-scale digital transformation, cloud-enablement, and cloud-migration projects,” Husak wrote. “This acquisition will provide our customers and partners the freedom to design, deploy, and achieve their IT operational goals, regardless of supplier or location, with the same level of trust that was previously achievable only through proprietary network-security schemes.”

The Scytale team, including its founders Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup, will join HPE. The San Francisco-based startup has raised $8 million to date.