Red Hat Strengthens Its Offer for Private and Sovereign Cloud

Red Hat has announced several innovations related to its private and sovereign cloud offering, starting from new features in its products to the launch of a local software supply chain to circumvent potential geopolitical issues.

Red Hat's offering has always been, by its very nature, sovereign due to being open source and therefore freely accessible; the company has built its fortune by pairing this with support services. Nonetheless, or perhaps for this very reason, Red Hat is betting heavily on the wave of attention to sovereignty and autonomy that is sweeping the tech world, particularly in Europe.

The company presented several new features that align with this direction: an expansion of the compliance framework simplifies the demonstration of meeting obligations related to regulations such as NIS2, GDPR, and DORA through the OpenShift Compliance Operator and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes.

A new interface for provisioning virtual machines also arrives, allowing partners and customers (whether internal or external) to easily and quickly create and deploy virtual machines, clusters, and AI services via OpenShift. To maintain cost control, Lightspeed now provides consumption data in OpenShift that remains entirely within the customers' environments, simplifying processes to maintain data residency.

Red Hat also discusses the availability of "landing zones," a rather opaque term to indicate the possibility of installing pre-configured environments to comply with all regulations from the get-go. These environments include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible and can be installed automatically.

Lastly, perhaps the most interesting novelty is related to how Red Hat manages its software supply chain. The company announced its intention to make it local, so that any communication issues with the parent company do not interrupt the availability of software outside the United States. Red Hat will begin with the European Union to make RHEL and related updates available locally.

"There should never be a need to choose between innovation and control," comments Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer of Red Hat. "Whether it’s about responding to jurisdictional constraints or reclaiming full ownership of data from proprietary silos, we provide the capabilities and platforms to build a more self-determined future. Red Hat is committed to helping companies drive innovation in cloud and AI on their own terms for the next decade."