Stop managing the past and start building IT’s future

We’re continuing to navigate a fundamental shift in digital infrastructure. Over the past 18 months, the predictability of the virtualization layer has shed nearly 20 years of stability driven by an unrelenting cost crisis. But this is just a symptom of a much deeper architectural challenge. The reality is that the infrastructure layer is being asked to perform tasks it was never originally designed for. We aren’t just managing virtual machines or even virtual machines with containers; it’s a simultaneous balancing act between legacy systems, cloud-native apps, and the burgeoning, GPU-intensive demands of artificial intelligence.

To survive this shift, you’ll hear the phrase “just modernize” thrown out. That’s a loaded term, however - how are you supposed to address all existing investments? What if an application cannot be “modernized” or it isn't worth the expense? 

Instead of adding more jargon to an already crowded lexicon, think of it as unifying your IT stack. Virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads all exist in isolation from one another, at least in most organizations. But managing each of these stacks separately fragments resources, skills and time - it’s just not sustainable. The answer lies with a unified platform approach—a single operational model that allows virtual machines, containers, and AI to run side-by-side with a consistent security posture.

What challenges lie beyond the platform

Beyond the platform, the most significant hurdle is human. Your engineering teams are currently tasked with an almost impossible mission: maintaining complete availability in the old environment while simultaneously architecting the new one. They are expected to perform this transition without additional headcount and without missing a single service-level agreement. 

This, more so than any platform problem, is why modernization efforts stall; migration is looked at as a technical swap rather than a complex, environment-spanning business risk. Success requires more than just a new hypervisor. It requires deep visibility into existing systems and fallback options at every stage of the journey. You aren’t just moving from one virtual machine platform to another; this is a fundamental pivot toward long-term agility.

Cloud services offer an appealing shortcut for this challenge, and one that is readily accessible and expedient. But going all-in on a single public cloud stack sacrifices critical system traits, namely consistency and operational independence. It may not even be an option due to regulatory or sovereign constraints. You can lose portability of workloads as business needs change and there’s now a new challenge in aligning existing environments with cloud environments, which often use different tools and standards. You don’t want to replace the virtualization challenge with the same problem in a different wrapper; you want actual choice and innovation. You want the flexibility of hybrid cloud.

The hybrid option is a controllable option

The hybrid cloud gives you the choice you need without sacrificing control, whether the latter is a regulatory concern or a business imperative. You can still lean on cloud services and resources when needed, such as running intensive frontier AI models, but otherwise sensitive workloads like internal AI agents can be kept in-house, on your own systems. Most of all, hybrid cloud supports unification of disparate stacks, the initial problem that most CIOs are trying to solve. Those legacy virtual machines, production cloud-native apps, and future-ready AI workloads can exist together on the same plane.

The current virtualization crisis is one that needs to be solved, but it’s also a catalyst for necessary change. This is an invitation to stop managing the past and start building a platform that can sustain the next decade of innovation. 

Red Hat is already helping our customers solve this challenge: Last year, the number of virtual machines (VMs) running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization increased by more than 400%. We reviewed more than 1 million VMs for migration, with migration occurring for more than 400,000. Those are huge numbers, but more than that, behind those numbers are customers who aren’t just looking to manage the past but to build a sustainable future.

Customers across industries are taking control of their technology stacks and their own innovation roadmaps. ARSAT, BNP Paribas, EUROCONTROL, NASA JPL, Telenet, and many others have selected Red Hat to jumpstart these efforts, whether it’s migrating VMs to a flexible, future-ready platform or preparing themselves for the inflection point of AI.

We must move from being consumers of technology to our own providers of sovereign, scalable services. We can’t control market forces or global dynamics, but we can control our technological destinies.. The path forward is not found in a single product, but in an operational model that bridges the gap between where your data lives today and where your business needs to be tomorrow.