Increase Business Agility with Hybrid Cloud and Containers

Rigid legacy IT infrastructure can prevent you from adjusting to change and also reduce the business value of IT. These complex environments often limit flexibility, speed, and scalability, resulting in slow application and service delivery. To overcome these challenges, you need a streamlined, agile, scalable, and fast IT environment that leverages hybrid cloud technology.

Enterprises that have been around for a while generally have invested time, money, and other resources in legacy systems and are striving to maximize their return on this “technical debt.” Extending the lives of these systems may never pay off, however, as they often slow resource delivery and increase the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

A variety of unconnected and incompatible point tools makes it difficult to manage systems consistently and understand infrastructure properties. This can lead to security vulnerabilities, performance and reliability issues, and misconfigurations. As a result, your organization may experience broad effects, especially within your IT operations and development teams. This makes it difficult to justify the value of IT to business.

Slow service delivery and application development can impede business success. Developers have to wait for resources, delaying application development processes and product launches. Users may go around IT to deploy unauthorized resources to get their jobs done, reducing IT’s control and overall security.

In order to deliver services faster to developers and lines of business, IT needs to minimize that technology hangover. Together, hybrid cloud, multicloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies provide the agility and portability needed to deliver flexibility, speed, and scalability.

Containers can help simplify your IT environment and operations. By isolating workloads from each other and abstracting them from the underlying infrastructure, containers provide increased consistency and security. This abstraction also simplifies management and deployment across different environments.

Containers help to speed IT operations and development cycles. Containerized applications can be deployed across different infrastructures without changes, and containerized microservices can be reused in other projects. Containers also support continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps methodologies that unify operations and development and speed processes.

Many enterprises are leveraging Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, to manage hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments.

Red Hat OpenShift offers automated installation, upgrades, and life-cycle management for every part of your container stack — the operating system, Kubernetes and cluster services, and applications — across the business.

OpenShift includes Operator Lifecycle Manager to further simplify management of Kubernetes-native applications with built-in operational knowledge. It also extends the Kubernetes application programming interface (API) to complex, stateful applications, allowing you to deploy, manage, and maintain them within Red Hat OpenShift.

Together, hybrid cloud, multicloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies provide the agility and portability required for IT to deliver services faster to developers and lines of business. This hybrid cloud foundation gives you the tools and technologies you need to speed operations and development. That makes it easier to pursue growth opportunities in new markets, better compete, and adapt to evolving customer behaviors and preferences.

For more insights into becoming a more agile business, download a free ebook about hybrid cloud and containers.