The federal government will spend more than $3 billion on cloud services this year, and cloud vendors have taken notice. Red Hat Inc. became the latest industry heavyweight to take aim at that opportunity on Tuesday with the introduction of a consultancy on-ramp aimed at paving the way for government agencies to pay as they go.

The Red Hat Cloud for Government suite is a product/service bundle put together with the goal of helping federal institutions meet the objectives of the “Cloud First” mandate that the White House began rolling out in 2011. Although far from the first to chase the opportunity, Red Hat isn’t late to the party. Three years after then-U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra laid out his his plan to nudge the notoriously sluggish public sector toward embracing the cloud, the bureaucratic machine is still just grinding into action.

A survey by consultancy giant Accenture plc published earlier this year found that only 30 percent of managers at government agencies are aware of their organizations’ strategies for adopting cloud services. There are some exceptions to the rule, however: after some legal wrangling with IBM, the CIA last year contracted Amazon.com Inc. to build it an on-premise replica of the ultra-efficient infrastructure powering the AWS public cloud in a deal worth $600 million.

But Red Hat isn’t trying to compete in the big leagues over the top echelon of the government technology food chain, or at least not yet. Instead, the open-source stalwart – which makes its living helping traditional organizations deal with the complexities of configuring and maintaining software – is targeting the much broader segment of agencies that are still struggling with the usual budgetary and operational barriers to adoption.

Red Hat Cloud for Government breaks down the challenge into two parts. In the first phase, the Linux distributor sends consultants to map out the existing processes of an agency and chart a course toward modernizing that infrastructure using its OpenStack distro and OpenShift lineup of platform-as-a-service tools. After that leg of is completed, the company is offering to help clients hook up their environments to FedRAMP-compliant public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, thereby completing the hybrid computing puzzle. And the whole process is carried out with regulatory requirements in mind, it promises.

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