Speed hybrid cloud innovation with Red Hat and Microsoft Azure

Modern IT organizations need to provide new technologies and services faster than ever. However, complex deployments and lack of time, skills, or expertise can cause delays, reduce efficiency and reliability, and introduce security risks. In response, organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud environments with advanced automation capabilities to speed delivery of innovative applications and services and enhance operational agility.

The combination of on-site infrastructure and public cloud resources provides the flexibility, scalability, and agility that organizations need to optimize workload performance and resource use. Centralized management and orchestration across hybrid cloud environments simplifies operations, improves visibility, and enhances control over IT infrastructure. Advanced automation and self-service capabilities speed resource provisioning and delivery of IT services. And robust security measures and built-in compliance frameworks can help mitigate vulnerabilities and protect both applications and data across diverse environments.

Red Hat and Microsoft understand the complexity of hybrid cloud environments. As long-term partners, we are committed to building integrated solutions that deliver high availability, reliability, and performance for our customers’ demanding applications. Together, we provide security-focused hybrid cloud solutions with cloud-native development and automation capabilities that help you deliver innovative technologies and services across every part of your business.

Through extensive experience building and supporting enterprise-grade technologies, Red Hat and Microsoft help you deploy and manage hybrid cloud infrastructure, adopt cloud-native development approaches, and rapidly build innovative applications. We bring together the ecosystems, platforms, and partnerships that help you maximize your return on investment (ROI), improve performance and business resilience, manage risk, and deliver new services based on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Whether you are migrating to the cloud to gain efficiency, improve security, or deliver intelligent applications, Red Hat® technologies on Microsoft Azure provide the choice, flexibility, and support you need to adopt modern IT practices and meet changing customer expectations. Many of these solutions are available in both fully managed and self-managed versions, so you can choose the right level of administrative involvement for your organization.

Ensuring consistent, efficient operations across complex hybrid cloud environments can be challenging. With Red Hat and Microsoft, you can deploy a standardized operating environment (SOE) across your Microsoft Azure cloud resources and on-site infrastructure to simplify deployment and management of critical workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux® on Microsoft Azure forms a consistent, security-focused operating system foundation for your SOE. In fact, migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure can increase capacity and productivity. One study found it helped organizations reallocate up to 40% of their time to value-add business initiatives.¹

Additionally, fully managed Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift® and self-managed Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure provide a comprehensive application platform for both traditional virtual machine-based and modern cloud-native applications. Finally, Red Hat and Microsoft Azure observability and management tools let you simply and consistently provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and manage workloads across your hybrid cloud environment to increase business agility and reduce cost.

Manual processes, repetitive tasks, and inefficient operations can decrease productivity, introduce vulnerabilities, and limit infrastructure scalability. Available as a fully managed service or a self-managed deployment, Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure lets you rapidly and consistently manage and govern hybrid cloud environments using a single set of processes, policies, and tools. Speed application deployments by automatically provisioning complete Microsoft Azure infrastructure— including instances, storage, and networks—across regions. Ensure consistency and reduce the risk of vulnerabilities through rapid replication and configuration of your Microsoft Azure cloud and on-site resources. Increase visibility into your resource use with a single, customizable interface for managing your environments and cloud services. And foster collaboration between teams using a common automation framework based on a simple, human-readable language.

Many organizations allocate a significant portion of their budget to common datacenter expenses, from licensing and hardware infrastructure to facilities, operations, and maintenance costs. Moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure helped reduce datacenter spending by 80%.¹ 

With Red Hat and Microsoft, you can bring your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, virtual machine scale sets, and custom images directly to Microsoft Azure, simplifying and speeding migration processes. You can apply your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend funds and discounts to Red Hat products on Microsoft Azure, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform, and Azure Red Hat OpenShift. And with Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux, you can convert running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines between pay-asyou-go and bring-your-own-subscription billing models, with estimated savings of up to 76%.²

The scalability, resilience, and uptime of your hybrid cloud environment are critical for meeting changing stakeholder and customer needs. Red Hat and Microsoft helped improve business continuity by reducing outage frequency by 50% and downtime by 85%.¹ 

We work closely to integrate platforms, tools, and services into fully featured environments that deliver increased reliability and scalability for your applications. A selection of backup and recovery options— including Azure Backup—let you implement comprehensive data protection strategies and safeguard critical workloads. And with advanced automation capabilities like Event-Driven Ansible, you can detect and respond immediately to potential issues—without human intervention—to ensure the availability, performance, and stability of your hybrid cloud environment.

Application modernization lets both developers and applications take advantage of innovative cloudbased tools and technologies. By modernizing applications and moving them to hybrid cloud environments, you can boost scalability, reliability, and security while reducing costs and improving customer experiences. In fact, migrating workloads to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure reduced the costs of legacy applications by up to 60%.¹

Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure help you build, deploy, and scale applications rapidly and efficiently. Migrate and deploy traditional applications in virtual machines on Microsoft Azure instances using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Then modernize them using container-native technologies and practices like microservices, serverless, and DevSecOps. Finally, integrate them with other legacy applications—all in a single platform. And with certified solutions from Red Hat and Microsoft ecosystem partners, you can adopt a variety of third-party products and technologies to speed innovation across application life cycles.

As environments expand across public cloud resources, on-site infrastructure, and edge devices, security and compliance become increasingly complex, with operations often distributed across multiple teams, business units, and geographies. Red Hat and Microsoft deliver technologies that help you consistently implement, manage, and automate security across your infrastructure and applications. Built-in security features and profiles help you maintain compliance and reduce risk for critical workloads and data. Compliance certifications help you meet security standards across key industries—including finance, retail, healthcare, and government. Continuous testing and verification of Red Hat security profiles on Microsoft Azure—along with third-party validation of global compliance requirements—help protect hybrid cloud infrastructure. And automated processes let you schedule enforcements across multiple regions and enforce identity and access management (IAM) policies at scale.

AI/ML technologies are reshaping human-machine collaboration, inspiring new approaches to problem solving, and delivering significant business gains across industries. Red Hat and Microsoft solutions bring data scientists and developers together to deliver intelligent applications and innovative customer experiences in rapidly evolving markets. Red Hat OpenShift AI builds on Azure Red Hat OpenShift to provide a comprehensive platform for building, training, deploying, and monitoring models and applications, while meeting the workload and performance demands of modern AI solutions. Teams can quickly move from experiment to production in a collaborative, consistent environment using key certified offerings like Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Services, and Azure Machine Learning. Together with comprehensive technology ecosystems, Red Hat OpenShift AI provides components and capabilities that speed development and deployment of innovative AI solutions across hybrid cloud environments.

Red Hat and Microsoft offer security-focused hybrid cloud solutions with automation and cloud-native development capabilities to help your business improve operational agility and deliver innovative new products and services. Deploy critical applications and workloads on a consistent operating system foundation across Microsoft Azure resources and on-site infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure. Automate hybrid cloud management and increase productivity with Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure. And build, run, and manage modern applications—including innovative AI/ML solutions—on a single platform across your hybrid cloud environment with Azure Red Hat OpenShift. 

Read more about our partnership and explore the benefits of Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure.