How a Modern Operating System Serves Government

This blog post is an excerpt from our new pocket guide, Innovation and Modernization With Hybrid Cloud. Explore why agencies need to update their operating systems here.

To deliver mission-critical services and be efficient in today’s world, government agencies are shifting IT from traditional infrastructure operations to become service-delivery-ready organizations.

Hybrid cloud is an important part of the transformation that is taking place across government. But government organizations face several challenges when implementing the kind of IT modernization via the hybrid cloud that will improve service delivery to citizens. To learn more about how a modern operating system can support containerization, GovLoop talked to from Ted Brunell, Senior Principal Solution Architect at Red Hat. Red Hat is a leader in open source technology and innovation delivery for the public sector.

“Today, to meet government’s needs, it really boils down to achieving agility, being able to do things faster and achieving a higher level of efficiency with the way that government is deploying and managing systems,” Brunell said.

To succeed with hybrid cloud, operational consistency is critical, he said. A key to operational consistency is platform. Hybrid and multicloud users should be able to easily interoperate across private and multiple public cloud environments with security and portability.

“Agencies deserve an operating system that’s flexible enough to operate in any cloud environment, whether it be a containerized environment or a virtual machine environment.” —Ted Brunell, Senior Principal Solution Architect, Red Hat

The operating system agencies select in hybrid cloud environments is critical to success. When operating across on-premise and public cloud environments, government needs applications to work the same way. It is essential to ensure that management, compliance and security work the same way across multiple, disparate environments is essential.

Having a common operating system powering hybrid cloud environments enables application consistency and portability, meaning that they should behave the same, can be managed using the same tools and processes, and accrue the same benefits regardless of whether they are deployed on-premise or in a public cloud.

“At Red Hat, we believe the platform technology to achieve this vision is Linux and Linux containers,” said Brunell. “Our platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, were designed to lead agencies to success in their hybrid cloud journey.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps, as it provides agencies the consistent and more secure foundation across hybrid cloud deployments and the tools they need to deliver these services and workloads faster with less effort – with any application on any footprint at any time.

“With RHEL we include built-in security management,” Brunell said. “It gives the customers confidence to run their critical workloads, it gives them stability, it’s a very high-performance platform. And lastly, it gives agencies freedom to innovate and access their technology that they want to use and deploy it.”

Through control, confidence and freedom, Red Hat Enterprise Linux reduces the friction and cost of this change while increasing agility and reducing the time to market of critical business workloads. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux everywhere, providing you a common operating environment, you are preparing yourself for going to the next phase of the cloud journey,” Brunell said.