Customers realize Multi-Cloud benefits of OpenShift

According to IDC Research¹, “By 2023, as a pillar of their IT multicloud approach, 70% of IT organizations will implement a strategic container/abstraction/API playbook to enhance application portability and hosting flexibility.”

IDC further predicted that, “Through 2024, 75% of CIOs will reshape all IT resources, including budgets, assets, and talent, to support real-time resource allocation and enterprise agility, dramatically reducing fixed costs.”

The key to unlocking these business innovations is the open hybrid cloud model. Incorporating multiple hardware providers, hardware types, locations, devices, developers, services and billing models, the hybrid cloud model of application delivery enables developers to innovate around the globe, at the edge, with AI, at scale and with reliability.

Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform offers security and compliance features on top of the typical hybrid and multi-cloud benefits. Modern business requirements make delivering such a model a complex challenge; enterprises now have to track which exact version of what software with what iteration of what data is running everywhere in the world, at all times. 

Imagine, for example, that a major country decides to leave the European Union. Overnight that country’s data retention policies may shift drastically, encumbering the business with something akin to techno-political debt. In a multi-cloud environment, however, data could be restricted by geographic location. 

Another example includes the use of AI to analyze data around the globe. Training machine learning algorithms requires large numbers of systems to examine large data sets for set periods of time. When the analysis is done, the algorithm can be tested and deployed. This entire development chain requires large scale usage of systems for the data, the analysis, the testing and the delivery of the end result application. Utilizing an open hybrid cloud approach enables teams to deploy these complex environments into on-premise locations when analyzing sensitive data, while also enabling those environments to run in public clouds when larger scale is required.

Additional benefits of the multicloud approach

Other multi-cloud benefits are more generally applicable to the day-to-day work of building business software. Ascend Money, for example, is Southeast Asia’s largest financial technology company, serves more than 40 million people in six countries. Rapid growth through acquisitions meant that teams in each country had different approaches to developing and deploying digital applications, preventing efficient collaboration. The company wanted to gain efficiency by building a central application development and deployment platform. Ascend Money standardized on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and can now more easily expand business products and services to meet customer demand more quickly.

Even less regulated industries can benefit from a multicloud strategy, especially when it enables the applications that run the business to become more resilient and performant. In the service industry, Hilton Hotels has used the OpenShift multicloud model to ensure customers have the best application experience regardless of where they are worldwide. 

Hilton now has the agility to bring new services to market that can stand up against non-traditional hotel competitors. Services like the ability to check in remotely, and open your hotel door with your phone, removing an entire layer of interaction from transactions. Today, 50% of the compute resources Hilton assigns to OpenShift Container Platform run on multiple clouds. The company plans to hit 70% in the future.

X by Orange worked with Red Hat Consulting to evolve its culture, processes, and technologies. The company selected Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to more quickly create and release new services using a provider-agnostic Kubernetes platform on top of multicloud infrastructure. 

“We chose Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for the freedom it gives us on top of different public clouds, all rooted in Kubernetes-native [application programming interfaces] APIs and experience,” said Jose Maria San José Juarez, chief technical and information officer at X by Orange. The company also adopted a DevOps approach and automated processes to increase self-service, delivery speed, and reliability.

Even companies with a business focus outside of technology are seeing the benefits of Multi-cloud on OpenShift. Cepsa, which operates across the oil and gas value chain, is immersed in a far-reaching digital transformation process spanning all its divisions and businesses, with the aspiration of being an agile, data-driven company. 

As part of its transformation, Cepsa has chosen Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, to help it more quickly bring ideas to market as new digital experiences for customers. Cepsa’s IT is made up of on-premises, private cloud and multiple public cloud (multicloud) environments. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cepsa is containerising applications on a standard platform, currently running on-premise and offering more flexibility in scaling across its hybrid cloud infrastructure in the future.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is building out its multi-cloud strategy with the help of Red Hat’s Ansible provisioning software. Schipol uses Ansible to provide Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provisioning, the process of managing physical infrastructure resources through files rather than hardware configurations or tools.

To quickly deploy OpenShift to meet an internal deadline, the airport chose to run Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a single-tenant Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud environment service by Red Hat. Schiphol also deployed OpenShift Container Platform in parallel in a Microsoft Azure cloud. The OpenShift Dedicated cluster will eventually be handed over to Schiphol and changed to OpenShift Container Platform to support the airport’s multicloud strategy.

During implementation, Schiphol engaged Red Hat Consulting to assist with building and deploying its OpenShift environment, particularly OpenShift Dedicated. The airport has now launched OpenShift Dedicated in production and is close to completing implementation of OpenShift Container Platform.

Cathay Pacific is also in the flying business. As an Asian airline with over 33,000 employees, the company needed to modernize its legacy IT architectures. Cathay Pacific worked with Red Hat to design and implement a modern hybrid cloud IT architecture platform and operating model. This new infrastructure offers on-demand scalability and portability and more efficient and cost-effective work processes. With these changes, Cathay Pacific can be more responsive to customer and business demands.

“Red Hat solutions have enabled us to deliver value to our customers much faster, with improved performance and stability,” said Kerry Peirse, General Manager of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Cathay Pacific Airways, Inc.

All of these companies have increased the speed with which they can deliver applications, thanks to the benefits of cloud-native application development. But it is their multi-cloud strategy which frees them from cloud-provider lock-in, regional outages and the ever-present threat of regional legislation. Kubernetes enables Linux containers to run anywhere, and Red Hat OpenShift gives enterprises the tools they need so that those containers are more secure, up to date and running in a compliant fashion, no matter where the actual computer running them lives.

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