Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience 2021.
A first clear summary is precisely the one offered at the event by Paul Cormier, President and CEO of Red Hat, and echoed by Gianni Anguilletti, the company’s Vice President Med Region, who gets straight to the point: “Every CIO is, or is called upon to become, a Cloud operator”.
A sentence that clearly illustrates the strategy underlying the company’s developments: this is in fact the context for all the announcements about new technologies and for the testimonials from customers such as Bosch, Volkswagen and Citybank, who described how they use Red Hat technologies to improve competitive agility and operational efficiency.
Anguilletti explains: “it is about helping your organisation find a way to get the best in terms of performance, efficiency, security, cost-effectiveness, scalability, agility and governance (without constraints) from the infinite number of infrastructures that can be built by combining the multitude of hardware systems, virtualised environments, and private and public Cloud platforms supporting business initiatives”.
Red Hat’s new technology proposition
Giuseppe Bonocore, Principal Solution Architect Red Hat Italy, goes into the details of the Summit’s new features: “There are two cornerstone technologies in the offering as far as the Open Hybrid Cloud is concerned, namely Red Hat Openshift (a Kubernetes-based PaaS offering for delivering workloads) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the foundation for delivering workloads (for example, including those at the Edge)”.
Among the most important announcements, it is worth mentioning the completion of the acquisition of StackRox, with its main product integrated into Red Hat as Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes.
The offering provides Kubernetes security for microservices-based workloads and for Kubernetes-based applications by addressing three aspects: the shift left of Cloud security practices (including at the code-writing stage, DevSecOps), the “securing of the infrastructure” from a posture perspective (CSPM, Cloud Security Posture Management) through a zero trust approach and, finally, ensuring the Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) by also securing workloads at runtime.
Another important expansion of the Red Hat portfolio concerns the new Managed Cloud Services.
With an offering that is expanding in several directions: in application services, for example, with Red Hat OpenShift Api Management; with Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka (an event streaming and management offering) and, finally, through Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, which offers a range of managed services to encourage the use of big data, machine learning and data intelligence technologies.
For a “data science workflow” that ranges from data management to data cleansing and the practical use of data in the various use cases.
From an infrastructure point of view, on the other hand, the main new features concern the evolution of Openshift as a Container orchestration platform, operating in data centres as well as with Cloud providers and hyperscalers.
“Managed” versions of Openshift are now available with all the main Cloud providers, addressing scenarios that require a rapidly activated managed service with the hyperscalers, as well as availability in self-managed on-prem mode for other use cases.
The Edge is an “extension” across the entire Red Hat portfolio.
The Edge is therefore seen as a way to make the most of data from data centres to field devices, and thus to enable typical IoT workloads.
In the Edge field, it is worth mentioning the Red Hat OpenShift proof of concept used by the International Space Station.
In collaboration with IBM Cloud, some of the workloads were run in space to demonstrate the possibilities of distributed Edge computing even in extreme conditions.
There are several mantras inscribed in Red Hat’s so-called “Open Hybrid Cloud Vision”.
Among these is the need to keep innovating in order to attract new customers, so as to tackle the competition from “digital first” companies head-on.
According to Red Hat, the open Cloud is the only platform that enables information technology to be a strategic enabler supporting companies’ business initiatives.
The Open Hybrid Cloud is precisely the strategy suggested by Red Hat for achieving the speed, scalability and stability needed to reach goals in the new normal.
To turn this vision into a concrete reality, Red Hat has continued to invest, today more than ever, in developing the macro components that shape the vision of the open Hybrid Cloud.
“It all starts with the development of modern, Cloud native, containerised, microservices-based applications that can leverage paradigms such as AI, machine learning and edge computing to adapt elastically to the changing operating conditions in which companies find themselves”, explains Anguiletti.
The CIO imperative: Dell’s words
Today, the imperative for CIOs is to transform their company into a digital leader in its sector, thereby ensuring better performance and the ability to manage change, even unexpected change. Enterprise IT is the foundation for achieving this result, but it must be complemented by new IT management models, new technologies and new organisational approaches.
