How open technology and process help the public sector innovate

The pandemic has pushed many public sector leaders to focus on modernization strategies aimed at delivering tangible business advantages, using new cloud-enabled tools. However, with a mix of legacy and cloud-based infrastructure, the challenge becomes how to keep systems functioning, secure and predictable, while being able to deliver new functional benefits to users so the whole organization benefits for progress.

The investments agencies have made over the last year in cloud infrastructure promises faster, more agile and more secure applications. But in addition to the infrastructure, leaders should look to cloud-native application development — using open source code — to add greater speed to software production and delivery lifecycles for both new and existing applications.

There is no single architecture that works for all cases, especially as today’s IT environments are increasingly distributed across dedicated data centers, public and hybrid cloud environments.

At Red Hat, we believe innovation is more than just putting new technology to work. Effective cloud-native development requires a comprehensive process that involves people, processes and technology.

Like many of our customers, Red Hat faced the same questions of how to keep up with the size, density and complexity of our own IT system. In 2016, Red Hat operated nearly 1,000 unique, independent applications and services that served various parts of the business. These applications were run by different teams, on different technology stacks, and across a number of redundant data center locations.

We started our own journey to evolve our IT environment to create a flexible and reliable application environment for the company. The result was a 55% smaller footprint per application, improved security, and a multisite hybrid cloud deployment with zero downtime.

Red Hat uses our own experiences to inform how we support enterprise-grade, open-source platforms and tools to our partners for. These technologies allow our partners to more easily share information and scale cloud-native application development.

In our recent white paper, we describe how combining open processes with cloud-native development approaches can benefit the organization by providing faster application updates, rapid application deployment, quicker fault recovery and improved coding accuracy.

Learn more about creating a strategy to build application environments for reliability, productivity and change.

This article was sponsored by Red Hat.