Friday Five — February 26, 2016

For the second consecutive year, we're happy to share that Gartner, Inc. has given Red Hat a "Positive" overall rating in Gartner's 2016 Vendor Rating report. Gartner creates Vendor Ratings for approximately 30 leading IT vendors, and Red Hat believes its "Positive" rating reflects on the standing of its technologies and solutions in today's IT market. Gartner's Vendor Ratings are highly structured reports that define Gartner's position on an individual vendor as a whole, not just on its position within a single market. Gartner's evaluation was based on various criteria, such as Red Hat's strategy, products and services, technology, marketing, and overall financial viability.

Recently, we asked 727 Red Hat customers from around the globe and across industries about their priorities for 2016... Some of the findings speak to new areas of strategic focus, while others highlight continued need for IT to do more with less, even as the role of IT becomes more relevant and strategic to the organization's success... Here are some of the results: Cutting costs is IT's top challenge in 2016; Private cloud deployments will outpace public cloud by 6x; IT investments will be focused on creating more secure, modernized workloads, but we'll also see big jumps in private cloud, DevOps, big data, mobile and IoT initiatives. View the infographic to see more results.

In a survey done by Black Duck Software last year, the findings showed that use of open source software has increased. The survey shows that 78% of respondents said their companies run at least part of their operations on open source–a number that has doubled since 2010... The survey goes on to say that 55% noted that open source delivers superior security... Michael Taylor, applications and product development lead at Rook Security, said the open source community has consistently created excellent tools for both general and security purposes. "The reason these tools have been successful is that they are created in the open, so there is no mystery behind what the code is actually doing. This allows each user to determine for themselves whether they are comfortable with the actions of the tools," he said. Additionally the user gets to be involved in the development process through the creation of additional features, bug reports, and code review of the projects. This community involvement greatly increases the population of testers and code reviewers.

In a sign of how rapidly hybrid cloud computing is evolving inside enterprise IT organizations, Red Hat today announced an alliance with Google under which the Red Hat Gluster Storage software will become available on the Google Cloud Platform. Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager for Red Hat Storage and Big Data, says the alliance with Google is the latest in a series of agreements between Red Hat and a number of cloud service providers intended to make it simpler to store data on premise and off using a common storage framework... In addition to being able to scale out to the cloud more easily using a distributed Gluster file system, Rangachari says IT organizations need to be able to invoke public clouds based on their performance attributes in specific geographic regions. That becomes a lot easier to accomplish when the same file system is being used across all those public clouds.

Unix and Linux have been using containers for a number of years but the technology's recent growth can really be attributed to Docker, whose partners include the likes of IBM, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft... Despite these deployments there are areas that vendors have been looking at with the technology that needs to be improving. Security is one of the areas. Gunnar Hellekson, director, product management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Enterprise Virtualization, and Josh Bressers, senior product manager, security, wrote in a blog post how containers are being fixed in the wake of the glibc vulnerability... The blog post points out that the development of container scanners is just a "paper tiger" that may help find a flaw but doesn't really help to fix it. Red Hat says: "We provide a certified container registry, the tools for container scanning, and an enterprise-grade, supported platform with security features for container deployments." This has been a common message that I have come across when reading about container deployments, vendors integrating with Docker and other container technology - typically there is a focus on improving security... Given its growing popularity and the benefits it can deliver to the organisation and developers, the technology is likely to continue on its rise to the top, particularly when it is taken into account the numerous big name vendors that are working on perfecting it.