Intelligence community insights: Driving efficiency with Red Hat OpenShift

The intelligence community (IC) will soon expand accessible clouds from one provider to four approved cloud providers. This change may bring challenges in moving and developing applications for agencies, but also will provide opportunities for growth, flexibility and capability not available before. Some agencies are better positioned to take advantage of these new multicloud capabilities as they have already been focusing on enabling hybrid cloud solutions to  meet mission needs. These agencies have adopted Red Hat OpenShift as their hybrid cloud foundation -- providing a flexible DevSecOps approach built around Kubernetes-managed container solutions. To learn more about this journey and other developments within the IC at Red Hat, visit our hub page here.

Background

In recent years, the IC has been rapidly adopting the cloud computing paradigm with limited access to the full spectrum of cloud capabilities available on the market. In November 2020, the community bestowed the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) award upon Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. This award will greatly change the ability of the community to use a multicloud approach and achieve flexibility not possible when only one cloud has been available.

C2E will soon have the approval and access needed to start using the additional cloud environments. This goes beyond the currently approved Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) . These additional environments bring several native capabilities and competitive advantages that are not available with a single provider, but it also brings the challenge of migrating and developing applications.

Best practices being delivered today to enable multicloud

A standard best practice for developing and delivering applications across the multicloud/hybrid cloud is utilizing a robust container-based solution that delivers a consistent experience across public cloud, on-premise and at the edge. The IC has achieved this capability by using a robust container management platform on the currently approved hybrid clouds.

As seen in this report from Forrester, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is recognized as a leader in providing successful DevSecOps solutions for multicloud. The study illustrates how OpenShift Platform Plus  improves productivity, reduces downtime, decreases hiring difficulty, enhances security and improves the speed and frequency of software releases and updates.

The IC is already adopting Red Hat OpenShift

Multiple agencies have already developed, installed and delivered container-based capabilities using Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. These container-based managed services are approved to operate on the currently available environments from the cloud, on-prem and edge devices to deliver capabilities.

With the use of Red Hat OpenShift, agencies have been able to deliver mission-critical applications while allowing developers to focus on innovation rather than managing the platform, security and infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus allows these agencies to provide a robust DevSecOps-based approach to rapidly develop and deliver applications, including artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions from the cloud to the edge.  This success allows rapid migration from stove-piped solutions to enterprise-ready, managed solutions with robust, flexible and dynamic capabilities.

Agencies using OpenShift Platform Plus are multicloud-ready

The agencies who have adopted for Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus are already multicloud-ready when additional clouds are available. One of the key benefits of OpenShift Platform Plus is its flexible and proven capability to offer a consistent solution on all cloud platforms across the C2E and most of the on-premises solutions currently available to the IC. This will allow agencies already operating on the platform to rapidly expand and adopt these additional cloud environments as they come online.

Red Hat is ready to help achieve success for the IC

Red Hat helps its customers across industry and government organizations achieve success with multicloud. Red Hat OpenShift helps enable the IC to accomplish its diverse missions, and the opportunity to expand to multicloud will help further increase the value of this proven approach. Red Hat is continuously working to develop new capabilities that will help better enable the IC to accomplish its missions today and meet their needs going forward.

Red Hat and its partners are ready to help deliver and expand leading platform capabilities to enable the next generation of needs across the multicloud.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift