Friday Five — November 20, 2015

The call for proposals for Red Hat Summit 2016 is now open until January 11 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Want to present in 2016? We are looking for your best solutions-focused sessions. Our attendees range from C-level executives and IT managers to engineers and developers, so we're looking for both high-level business and IT strategy sessions and technical deep dives. Even if you've submitted to previous Summits, check out this year's submission guide on our website. We've updated some of our speaker and session guidelines. Red Hat Summit will be held June 28-July 1, 2016 in San Francisco, CA. Questions? Contact redhatsummit-cfp@redhat.com.

Today the business of open is alive and well... "Open source has provided an unparalleled degree of innovation [says Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat]. For example, the cloud is a culmination of the collaborative efforts that were created by the open source development model. What we know as the cloud today simply would not exist without open source. This type of collaboration and innovation has made everyone change their models. It's no longer acceptable to simply stand still and wait for a five-year update to that software that you purchased back in the day. In order to compete, you have to constantly iterate. Open source allows organizations to do this, because it makes the procurement of new and innovative features easier to implement and deploy. Everything is right at your fingertips, and constantly being worked on and improved by some of the world's leading developers."

Red Hat was faced with fragmented customer data scattered across multiple, incompatible systems. Recognizing that the ability to access clean data is critical to improve decision-making, Red Hat launched Customer 360. Using its own Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat integrated customer data across its key systems—Salesforce.com, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Customer Data Hub. The integration lays the foundation for advanced customer analytics and better decision-making.

Watch the recent Red Hat virtual event, focused on IT security. You can access the event keynote and 3 breakout sessions by using the event registration link. Breakout sessions include IKEA speaking about how 2 employees patched over 3000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers during Shellshock; a discussion on how technologies like SELinux, containers, and hybrid management can help organizations create a new security strategy; how Red Hat secures its software supply chain; and what questions organizations should be asking their developers and vendors about their software security.

One of the biggest challenges for federal agencies looking to move to the cloud is figuring out what types of data they have and where that data can reside... At the Red Hat Government Symposium, FedRAMP Director Matt Goodrich said even as agencies are mixing in cloud instances with their legacy systems, they are struggling with what data they have and where it's appropriate to put that data. "The reason why you would do hybrid cloud is because you have different types of data," Goodrich said. "I think the government either over-classifies a lot of the data or doesn't really take the time to actually look at the data and actually understand how to do hybrid environments. That's not exactly been a best practice. We don't know how many data centers we have five years ago. If we don't know what type of data centers we have, how do we know what data we have?" Goodrich added that it's important to get ahold of that data, because while each cloud provider offers essentially the same service, the small differences in how each company handles data could be extremely important to each agency's individual missions.