Friday Five — August 14, 2015

Red Hat launched its Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 into general availability. The distribution combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, the latest OpenStack release, and the company's services for installing and managing OpenStack Clouds into a single product. Red Hat says this update will make it easier for cloud operators who want to use OpenStack to manage their deployments... Many of the new OpenStack features have been inspired by the needs of telecom companies, who were some of the earliest adopters of the platform.

Some 86 percent of enterprises are expected to use open source technologies in their IoT infrastructures, and the responsibility lies with open source vendors to explore the possibilities for locking down networks effectively to protect against the myriad of new data points this creates. Red Hat has been looking at the potential impact of this with the development of a new product to protect data centres from the potential calamities this can bring... Red Hat's solution [to security vulnerabilities] is a multi-layered defence that maximises the chances of preventing data centre infection. "Red Hat is working on a gateway that filters data coming into the data centre with a number of security features," [Josh] Bressers explained. "By having lots of different layers, people are bound to get through some of them, but the chances of making it through all of them to penetrate the data centre is much, much smaller."

We are pleased to share that Red Hat's Diane Mueller, Director of Community Development, OpenShift, was selected by the Cloud Network of Women (CloudNOW) as one of the Top 10 Women in Cloud for 2015. CloudNOW's recognition honors Diane's 20+ years of work designing and implementing products and applications embedded into mission critical financial and accounting systems at Fortune 500 corporations. At Red Hat, Diane focuses on cross-community collaboration and drives both customer and developer community initiatives to promote the success of OpenShift, Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). She has been instrumental in the launch of OpenShift Commons, an open source community initiative to collaborate and deepen engagement with OpenShift and the technologies it is built upon.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst doesn't look like your stereotypical gambler... [but] he's betting on cloud computing ‐ what's been called the future of IT. Whitehurst, like many of his peers in the tech world, thinks this technology will further integrate itself ‐ not just into people's daily lives, but into the IT strategy behind every business in the globe... While Red Hat's traditional open-source business continues to make up the majority of revenue dollars, Whitehurst's crystal ball tells him that the tide is turning. The open-source concept has coders from around the world collaborating with Red Hat to ensure that its version will be what customers want when adoption does, eventually, take off. "The market is maturing," says [Steve] Ashley, adding that Red Hat is definitely a leader in the space right now. "Red Hat simply has more experience and expertise developing in OpenStack than these other companies and [it is] moving faster."

Technology debt is any technology implementation that inhibits your flexibility, agility and speed to market... Reducing technology debt should be a key priority for a CIO because, although it will take initial effort to identify your debts and streamline your processes, in the long run it will lessen the effort required to implement change. And in today's technology landscape, you have to be able to change rapidly to remain effective. In Red Hat IT, we are addressing the need to go fast and keep pace with rapidly changing technology needs in a few ways... We are investing very heavily in cloud, specifically open, hybrid cloud, and we are already seeing significant benefits in terms of flexibility, agility, and speed to market.