But while OSS drives differentiation at the business layer, adopting it at the infrastructure level brings a different kind of challenge. In highly regulated, security-conscious environments, enthusiasm for OSS must be balanced with a firm grip on operational risk. This is especially true for Kubernetes-based stacks, which underpin not just internal developer platforms but increasingly the AI toolchains that financial institutions are prioritizing.

So how can financial services organizations fully participate in the innovation that OSS enables — without being exposed to the very risks that regulators, security teams, and auditors are right to worry about?

The trust gap: participation vs. control

The 2024 FINOS State of Open Source in Financial Services report makes this tension plain. 

Financial firms are significant consumers of open source, with 88% saying it improves software quality and 84% agreeing it delivers business value. 

Yet fewer than 40% of organizations have formal processes to evaluate OSS components, and only 20% report having an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) to ensure compliance across teams. 

Confidence in the ability to track and maintain OSS usage is mixed: just 30% say they’re “extremely confident” they can control which components are used, and 37% say the same about keeping them up to date.

Our own State of Production Kubernetes report at Spectro Cloud echoes these themes in the cloud-native space. Across hundreds of enterprise respondents, governance, lifecycle management, and security consistently rank among the top Kubernetes challenges. The picture is clear: while OSS offers flexibility and choice, it also demands responsibility.

OSS isn’t the risk. But unmanaged OSS is.

Cloud-native OSS: power and complexity

This challenge is magnified in the cloud-native ecosystem. Kubernetes is not a single product — it’s a patchwork. Building a production-grade stack involves integrating dozens of open source components: networking plugins, ingress controllers, service meshes, monitoring tools, storage interfaces, security scanners, and more.

That diversity is a strength. It allows teams to choose best-in-class tools and tailor their platforms to exact needs. But it also creates surface area. Misconfigurations can expose vulnerabilities. Component mismatches can break interoperability. Rapid update cycles make it hard to keep up with patches. And in many cases, firms are left depending on community support, which may be slow, inconsistent, or absent altogether when it matters most.

A recent Spectro Cloud–hosted discussion with security specialists from KTrust highlighted this concern in vivid terms. When supply chain vulnerabilities emerge — often buried deep in transitive dependencies — the SBOM (software bill of materials) becomes a forensic tool. But too often, security teams struggle to even generate SBOMs from heterogeneous Kubernetes cluster stacks, let alone analyze and act on them fast enough. Add in edge deployments and multi-cloud architectures, and the governance challenge becomes multidimensional.

What safe OSS adoption really requires

So what does it take to adopt cloud-native OSS safely, without compromising innovation?

Whether you’re running Kubernetes in a single data center, across multiple clouds, or at the edge, the answer lies in structured, repeatable controls. These controls must span the full lifecycle of the platform and all its moving parts.

Here’s what those guardrails look like:

Interoperability and standardization

The CNCF ecosystem is vast — but not all components play nicely together and even small version iterations can introduce breaking changes. 

Consistent interoperability testing and curated combinations enforced by a central platform team  reduce the risk of subtle integration issues, especially across teams of maverick developers, or varied lines of business.

Hardening and best-practice configuration

Every OSS component should be deployed with secure defaults and hardened settings, enforced by policy. That includes things like RBAC lockdowns, API server restrictions, resource quotas, and pod security policies — not just for Kubernetes, but for every addon.

Patching and lifecycle management

Cloud-native OSS evolves fast. Applying security updates and new features means rebuilding and retesting the stack often. Automation is critical, but so is version control, rollback, and policy-based approval to ensure that nothing slips through unreviewed.

A declarative approach to infrastructure creation, even following a ‘rebuild and teardown’ approach vs patch in place, is the best way to minimize configuration drift.

Observability and auditability

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Every OSS component in the stack should emit logs and metrics, feed into centralized observability pipelines, and be subject to consistent audit trails to meet compliance expectations.

Security scans and vulnerability management

Given the complexity of K8s infrastructure and modern microservices application architectures, routine scans are essential at build, deploy, and runtime. That includes image scanning, configuration linting, and SBOM generation. But detection isn’t enough; you need the processes and resources to respond to findings, fast. That may mean investing in specialist tooling and specialist teams.

Support you can rely on

Community OSS support can be outstanding, especially in a thriving field like cloud-native, where events like KubeCon see thousands of enthusiasts get together, full of excitement. 

But project support is always best-effort and even the best can’t promise a hotfix at the end of a phone. Our research has shown IT leaders are concerned about this, and with good reason. For critical infrastructure, firms need formal support channels, SLAs, and vendor accountability, especially during incident response or CVE fallout.

Unified policy and governance

Finally, controls must be consistent wherever applications run. From public cloud to on-prem, and now increasingly at the edge, policy enforcement and risk posture must travel with the workload. This is where open source projects like FINOS Common Cloud Controls (C3) point the way, providing a framework for consistent security and compliance controls across heterogeneous environments.

The path forward: embrace with intent

The financial services industry is already an OSS champion. But safe adoption of cloud-native infrastructure requires more than enthusiasm. It demands discipline.

Open source is a force multiplier. It lowers the cost of innovation and reduces time to market. But it only delivers on that promise when used deliberately, with eyes open to its risks and a plan to manage them.

In a space as mission-critical and regulated as financial services, guardrails are not a nice-to-have. They are the minimum bar for participation. And the good news is: the tools, processes, and communities to do it right already exist. The opportunity is here — for firms to not only consume open source safely, but shape its future, together.

Author:  Spectro Cloud Team