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Almost 10 years after the Office of Management and Budget first directed agencies to begin moving to the cloud, those agencies no longer need to be told. They’ve seen the benefits, and cloud-first policies and the need to reduce datacenters are no longer the primary drivers. Experts say flexibility in application development and deployment, a better place to innovate in digital services, and enhanced security rank among the most common reasons.

But it can be a slow process, partly due to strict government requirements. Agencies need to meet requirements for security, uptime, disaster recovery, and workload portability with their hybrid cloud infrastructures..

That’s where Red Hat can help.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is designed for hybrid cloud environments. It provides much-needed capabilities, including: scaling, the ability to more easily move workloads and manage applications that run in multiple environments; and built-in predictive analytics and remediation. It can bring a level of simplicity to agencies as IT infrastructure rapidly grows more complex, while still delivering the speed agencies need to keep up with demand and the security capabilities to safeguard their data.

That’s because it’s built on three main pillars:

1. Control
2. Confidence
3. Freedom to Innovate

The first of those pillars, control, means the environment should be secure. As IT infrastructure becomes more complex and disconnected, it can be harder for agencies to quickly identify and respond to security threats.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 offers agencies the security capabilities they need across infrastructure. The operating system comes with standards and compliance built in. It uses OpenSCAP, an auditing tool designed to verify the presence of patches and checks system security configuration settings. It’s based on specifications for maintaining system security for enterprise systems from the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

It also features support for NIST’s National Checklist program, a series of government guides to properly configuring IT products to an operational environment, required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation since 2017.

In addition, Red Hat plans to support Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and Common Criteria in the future, continuing its track record of meeting both federal and international standards.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also comes with Red Hat Insights, which uses predictive analytics to proactively identify and remediate threats across multiple environments to help reduce downtime and decrease security vulnerabilities. Insights’ automation means ops teams can take a proactive posture toward errors; it can provide potential issues and fixes before the errors occur, and even the remediation itself can be automated. Red Hat is the only open source vendor with the depth of knowledge to provide a tool like this that goes above and beyond what’s found in open source community projects.

The second pillar, confidence, means agencies should be able to expect that the system will always work. Those same standards, tools, analytics and automation help Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 deliver the company’s trademark reliability and stability.

It also is designed to deliver the performance federal agencies need. In fact, all of the Top 500 supercomputers are running Linux, and the top two are specifically running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And strong collaborations between Red Hat, the Department of Energy, NVIDIA and IBM have facilitated the creation of better open source technologies, enabling the number one supercomputer to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux unmodified on IBM Power with NVIDIA graphics processing units.

The third pillar, freedom to innovate, means Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is designed to enable agencies to experiment with emerging technologies and new approaches to IT modernization while maintaining a consistent foundation. Innovation is quickly becoming one of the top priorities driving organizations to adapt to change. Red Hat support for GPUs facilitates more choice in development and running both traditional and containerized applications, as well as support for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

It also allows for innovation in a variety of platforms. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was developed for x86, IBM POWER and zSeries, and ARM, but it also runs on all four footprints: physical, virtual, private cloud, and public cloud.

And Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform that offers a more secure and consistent foundation for modern and emerging cloud-native workloads.. OpenShift also provides a console that delivers enhanced visibility across multiple deployments, giving agencies a consistent foundation for on-premises and cloud workloads. Soon, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 will support Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 as well.

Control, confidence and the freedom to innovate are all qualities federal agencies need in order to keep up with the rapidly changing IT modernization landscape. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 can deliver all of that and more to help the government succeed in hybrid cloud environments. And because it’s a subscription applicable to all supported versions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can try it anytime without buying anything new. Learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 at an upcoming virtual event on June 18th.

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