Brightly uses Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS to build scalable hybrid cloud platform

Brightly Software, a global provider of intelligent asset management solutions, sought to support rapid growth by modernizing its IT foundation to become more robust and scalable. With support from Red Hat® Open Innovation Labs and Red Hat Consulting, Brightly adopted Red Hat OpenShift® Service on AWS as the platform for its modernization strategy.

Here are 4 lessons from Brightly Software’s successful IT modernization journey with Red Hat.

Brightly’s services were a collection of products acquired through acquisition. Overcoming technical debt was key to supporting business growth.

“We need to grow with our customers by scaling in a standardized, predictable way,” said Ian McGonigle, Director of Cloud Operations, Brightly. “We want to give them the same level of service day in, day out, year over year.” 

How Red Hat helps: OpenShift Service on AWS provides public cloud scalability for flexible yet stable application development. Consumption-based billing, self-service cluster creation, and integration with other AWS services make it easier to run OpenShift on AWS and respond to customer demand at scale.

Like many organizations, Brightly faced a choice between using its DevOps resources to manage its IT infrastructure or address the challenges of acquiring new technology and delivering new features.

“Using Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS lets us focus our scarce DevOps resources on improving our applications and delivering automation to our software developers, instead of managing our Kubernetes platform,” said Kent Norton, CTO, Brightly.

How Red Hat helps: OpenShift Service on AWS is a jointly supported managed service that provides a production-ready application platform. Organizations can use it to create fully managed Red Hat OpenShift clusters backed by a global Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team—and focus on innovation instead.

As part of its delivery of asset management services to organizations in industries and locations worldwide, Brightly faces a complex security and regulatory environment.

“We need to address our customers’ regulatory needs, from GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation] and beyond,” said McGonigle. “For example, some countries or governing bodies restrict the use of public cloud and require local, private cloud environments instead.”

How Red Hat helps:  provides a consistent experience across private cloud, public cloud, and edge computing environments. Applications can easily be moved between on-premise and AWS cloud environments as business needs change. Automated security patching and upgrades help protect systems and software.

To learn best practices and support a culture of collaboration, Brightly worked with Red Hat Consulting and participated in Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, an immersive residency for adopting open source practices. This engagement laid the foundation for Brightly to adopt OpenShift on AWS.

“We had a set of individuals who were already high performing and highly skilled. Red Hat helped them to become a successful team that empower each other. That creates a more collaborative, open, beneficial, and fun environment,” said McGonigle. 

How Red Hat helps: Red Hat Services can help organizations build and develop effective, collaborative teams equipped to make the most of their technology. Red Hat’s open source experts can help teams modernize platforms, manage cloud-native applications, and adopt automation to prepare for any business challenge.