Mainsail Partners with AccuKnox to Secure Edge and Federal Defense Workloads
San Francisco, CA, AccuKnox, a Zero Trust Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), and Mainsail, a secure hypervisor company purpose-built for defense and industrial edge environments, today announced a formal go-to-market partnership. The integration embeds AccuKnox KubeArmor runtime protection directly into Mainsail's Starlight platform, delivering policy-driven security enforcement from the Linux kernel across containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal hosts.
Securing the Unmanaged Defense Workloads Needs More Than a Hypervisor
Defense contractors, industrial manufacturers, and Department of Defense (DoD) programs increasingly deploy workloads at the edge, on hardware that runs outside the perimeter of traditional cloud security controls. Legacy hypervisors like VMware carry operational complexity, licensing overhead, and security architectures not designed for contested or air-gapped environments. Mainsail's Starlight platform addresses the hypervisor challenge. AccuKnox addresses the security gap. Together, they deliver a validated, turnkey solution that organizations can procure and deploy as a single appliance.
Why Mainsail Integrated AccuKnox - Security Layer Built Into the Stack
Mainsail selected AccuKnox KubeArmor for its eBPF-based enforcement architecture and its ability to operate in non-Kubernetes, systemd-mode deployments. Key reasons include:
Kernel-level enforcement without orchestration dependency: KubeArmor runs in systemd mode on Starlight nodes, protecting Podman containers and guest VMs without requiring Kubernetes. Security policy is enforced at the Linux kernel using LSM-BPF, not at the application layer.
Single-pane control from hardware to workload: AccuKnox Cloud connects to Starlight nodes directly, delivering centralized policy management, aggregated telemetry, and compliance reporting across distributed edge deployments. Starlight Desktop provides local runtime visibility and real-time alerts at the node level.
Defense-grade trust model: The combined stack uses trusted computing principles across the full hardware-to-application chain, making it appropriate for DoD programs, Lockheed Martin-scale defense contractors, and industrial manufacturers replacing VMware in critical environments.
During integration and validation, AccuKnox demonstrated continuous workload monitoring, process-level blocking, and VM-level isolation running natively within Starlight's architecture, with no dependency on a Kubernetes control plane.
Leadership Testimonials
"At Mainsail, protecting customer workloads is foundational. By integrating AccuKnox into the Starlight platform, we deliver runtime protection across containers, virtual machines, and AI. As organizations deploy AI at scale, the next frontier of security is protecting AI models, training data, and user interactions themselves. Through our partnership with AccuKnox AI-Security 2.0, we are extending Starlight's security posture beyond infrastructure into the AI layer, helping organizations safely deploy and operate AI workloads in even the most sensitive environments."— Brad Sollar, CTO, Mainsail
"Partnering with Mainsail brings AccuKnox's zero trust runtime protection to the tactical edge, where defense workloads demand enforcement that works disconnected, degraded, and in real time. The Dell appliance model gives us a turnkey delivery purpose-built for classified and edge environments. Together, this is how zero trust actually gets deployed at the edge, not as a slide deck, but as a hardened appliance with enforcement baked in."— Ron Victor, Strategic Advisor, AccuKnox
Go-To-Market
The primary commercial vehicle for this partnership is a turnkey hardware-plus-software appliance. The stack combines Dell infrastructure, Mainsail Starlight as the secure hypervisor, and AccuKnox as the embedded security layer. The combined solution is available as a single Dell SKU, removing procurement complexity for federal and enterprise buyers.
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