“There has definitely been a dominant perspective, especially from the C-suite and the boardroom, that ‘cloud is good’, so move everything to cloud,” says McLaren.

But something of a false choice appears to have presented to enterprises, between “public cloud” and “private cloud,” which effectively a modernisation of an organisation’s internal IT to try and provide the same type of capability as public cloud.

“Perhaps the best way to do it is to try and combine both,” McLaren says. “A well-thought-out, open-source-based hybrid cloud strategy can be the answer.”

Red Hat believes that implementing an open hybrid cloud strategy can give an organisation the flexibility to run your applications across environments—from bare metal to virtual machines, edge computing, private cloud, and public clouds—without having to rebuild applications, retrain people, or maintain disparate environments.

This strategy can enable rapid and robust digital transformation, McLaren says, because it accommodates the organisation’s unique requirements and can help development, architecture, and operations teams accomplish their goals with speed, stability and scale.

“The key word is ‘open’, as in open-source software and open standards, that allow applications and data to consistently move from one environment to another. In a proprietary system, organisations have flexibility only with that system, while open hybrid cloud allows all of these systems and applications to talk to each other and move data freely,” McLaren says.

“The open hybrid cloud strategy helps organisations design and build infrastructure and applications using enterprise open-source software that works across all IT environments. This means that teams are able to run and manage applications anywhere, which can help achieve the scale needed for sudden growth,” he says.

As with everything Red Hat does, each customer’s solution is tailored from an open ecosystem.

ANZ Bank, one of the top four banks in Australia and part of the top 50 worldwide, decided early on that investing in digital would differentiate its brand.

Their internet banking offering had been the linchpin for digital operations, but had begun to hold the bank back from fully embracing its digital goals as more digital services were added. ANZ chose Red Hat OpenShift to develop the new foundation for its internet banking capabilities.

Red Hat provided an enterprise-ready container platform that had the capabilities to enable ANZ to meet the scale, reliability, supportability and security requirements for hosting one of the bank’s most critical workloads.

“We recognise that business and technology have to work together, to have a regular flow of value, to help us build world-class solutions in a more modern way,” said Gerard Florian, Group Executive for Technology, ANZ.

McLaren says: “Open-source has taught us that many problems are too big for any single vendor to solve on their own and no vendor can act alone in a hybrid cloud world and succeed.”

“Our channel partners, from independent software vendors (ISVs) to systems integrators and beyond, are absolutely central to our strategy in driving IT modernisation and open hybrid cloud for customers. These partners, and the programs that we have in place with them, play a critical role in enabling customers to access the tools and services they need to enable true innovation.”

Using open-source solutions, organisations can secure their futures on a more innovative and more flexible footing – while also building better solutions for their customers. It’s the “new normal” of IT, and organisations can learn more about it at Red Hat’s flagship annual event,  Red Hat® Summit 2022, on May 10-11, 2022.

This year’s event is intended to give organisations the tools to help them define the future of open technology and provide them with flexibility in choosing the topics most relevant to their business needs.

Registration for the Red Hat Summit 2022 is available here. On-demand content will be available after the opening keynote.