Architecting a hybrid cloud that speeds up innovation

MANILA, Philippines — Asia Pacific holds a wealth of growth opportunities for businesses, with the region contributing to over 60% of the global GDP¹. Since it also houses more than 4 billion unique mobile users², offering applications with a good customer experience will be key to tapping into the region’s economic potential.

Organizations are increasingly making cloud their default deployment choice—with plans for a hybrid/multicloud future—to effectively address customers’ demand for an ongoing stream of compelling new and differentiated services, features, and experiences.

IDC³ found that 70% of organizations have deployed multicloud environments, and 64% of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private.

Hybrid cloud can empower organizations to use digital capabilities and technologies to help them be service delivery ready and facilitate business agility. It allows organizations to focus on innovating instead of “keeping the lights on” by providing a consistent environment to build, deploy, and manage applications, regardless of the underlying infrastructure (i.e., on-premise, public or private cloud). 

Full potential of hybrid cloud

Although hybrid cloud can offer the flexibility and business agility required to thrive in the non-static business environment, these benefits can only be reaped if the hybrid cloud is built on a foundation that offers security and operational consistency.

To achieve this, some organizations are building their hybrid cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In fact, a recent study by IDC⁴ found that RHEL is most frequently used for enterprise management and production (26%) and IT infrastructure (20%).

Cathay Pacific⁵ is one such organization.

By migrating from its legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud architecture that is built on RHEL, the Hong Kong airline can now better scale its IT infrastructure to meet evolving application requirements.

This new infrastructure also helped Cathay Pacific to reduce its provisioning times from weeks to under an hour, enabling it to be more responsive to business demands and bring new customer-facing services to market faster.

In sum, capturing new opportunities presented by the Asia Pacific region will require organizations to use hybrid cloud to catalyze innovation instead of simply treating it as a technology stack that helps improve productivity and reduce operational costs.

They should, therefore, build their hybrid cloud on a secure and consistent foundation that provides the tools needed to deliver services and workloads faster with less effort, regardless of the application’s footprint.

This will enable them to overcome the common hybrid cloud challenges and sustain business success by using hybrid cloud to support new workloads from AI (Artificial Intelligence) to IoT (Information of Things) to provide customers with differentiated and delightful services.

Learn more about IT Optimization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux here.

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/REO/APAC/Issues/2018/10/05/areo1012

[2] https://wearesocial.com/sg/blog/2019/01/digital-2019-global-internet-use-accelerates

[3] IDC, Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Core and Edge Computing Platforms, Sept. 2018

[4] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-enterprise-linux-impact-10-trillion-global-business-revenues-2019

[5] https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/cathay-pacific