UK Ministry of Defence Collaborates with Red Hat to Improve Digital Delivery, Unlock AI Capabilities and Scale its Hybrid Cloud

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a new enterprise agreement with the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) to provide centralised and scalable access to Red Hat's hybrid cloud platforms for greater efficiency, faster innovation and a consistent security footprint. The agreement aims to enhance cloud-native and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and improve interoperability across MOD operations and approved third-party providers nationwide.

The MOD has a mission to accelerate its digital innovation UK-wide to deliver services more quickly to gain competitive edge and improve resilience for national critical infrastructure. To achieve this, the MOD is working to standardise its digital environment to include the adoption of cloud-native application development and provide more consistent user experiences and an enhanced security footprint across various workloads and services. This is vital given the complexity of its IT estate, the need to mitigate potential cyber threats and the desire for a common foundation internally and with partners to deliver AI at scale. 

Defence Digital Foundry provides a central shared digital service capability for all departments that make up the MOD, including the Royal Navy, British Army, Royal Air Force, Space and Cyber & Specialist Operations Command. Building on the reliance upon, and trust in, Red Hat platforms already used across the MOD, Defence Digital Foundry is expanding its collaboration with Red Hat to provide standardised access for MOD teams and approved third-parties working on MOD technology programmes and capabilities.

Computacenter is supporting the ongoing onboarding and access of the enterprise agreement, covering technologies including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat AI and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. MOD users can take advantage of Red Hat Services, including technical experts, hands-on training and dedicated time with Red Hat Consulting, to get up to speed more quickly and ease adoption of Red Hat offerings into projects and programmes.

Expected benefits of the enterprise agreement include: 

• Hybrid cloud flexibility so anyone at MOD can access Red Hat’s tools and services to build applications and deploy them on premise, in any cloud or at the edge. This includes enabling AI at scale, unifying previous fragmented efforts with a common platform for AI initiatives. Red Hat AI accelerates development and delivery of AI solutions, by offering optimised inference, the ability for collaboration on the same platform for developers and data scientists, and a choice of any AI model on any accelerator and any cloud.
• Consistency of operations and cybersecurityposture including simplified lifecycle management of applications and trusted software supply chain through standardising on Red Hat platforms. Collaboration and sharing of best practice and common patterns across teams provides upskilling opportunities around the UK, helps optimise processes and reduces duplication often created by silos. Ecosystem engagement enables faster innovation, with approved third-party providers able to use Red Hat software for MOD workloads and services.
• Enterprise-wide automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This provides a unified way for teams to reduce manual tasks, increase efficiency and drive repeatability and compliance at scale for IT operations, configuration management, security orchestration and service provisioning, moving beyond fragmented automation efforts.
• Modern application development with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, enabling agile practices such as microservices, DevSecOps and secure-by-design principles across MOD domains. This supports faster time-to-market for new applications and software updates and increased developer productivity with a scalable access model from prototype to operational deployment. MOD also gains a choice of virtualisation solutions and a well lit migration path from virtual machines to containerised workloads and the opportunity to manage both side-by-side using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, offering more flexibility and potential cost savings. 

Supporting Quotes

Joanna Hodgson, regional manager, UK and Ireland, Red Hat

“Red Hat is pleased to support the UK Ministry of Defence on its path to faster digital transformation and greater efficiency by helping to make the organisation’s IT landscape more responsive and adaptable. With Red Hat providing a centralised cloud-native platform and approach, all teams across the UK Ministry of Defence can develop and deliver new mission-driven digital services faster with a more consistent security footprint. Red Hat offers flexibility and scalability to deploy any application or any AI model on their choice of hardware, whether on premise, in any cloud or at the edge, helping the UK Ministry of Defence to harness the latest technologies, including AI.”

Mivy James, chief technology officer, UK Ministry of Defence

“Red Hat is helping Defence Digital Foundry build our unified, modern digital backbone to keep the UK Ministry of Defence agile and innovative. With this enterprise agreement, people up and down the country working for the UK Ministry of Defence can more easily and reliably access tools and collaborate using common Red Hat-based platforms, and we’re able to increase operational efficiency, save resources and optimise costs. Easing access to Red Hat platforms becomes all the more important for the UK Ministry of Defence in the era of AI, where rapid adoption, replicating good practice and the ability to scale are critical to strategic advantage.”