In the rapidly evolving cloud computing market, a major challenge for businesses is managing systems dispersed across a variety of on-premises and multicloud infrastructure while assuring compliance and governance.

Red Hat Inc. has partnered with leading cloud providers and is constantly evolving its managed service offerings to facilitate this process, according to Sathish Balakrishnan (pictured), vice president of hosted platforms at Red Hat.

“If you really look at Red Hat’s evolution as a managed service provider in the public cloud, we’ve been doing this since 2011,” Balakrishnan said. “So, the customers have that exact same experience that they can get any one cloud across all clouds, as well as on-prem. We monitor the results, [and] customers now have a choice of a self-managed OpenShift or completely managed OpenShift.”

Balakrishnan spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next OnAir event. They discussed the challenges of managing hybrid and multicloud environments, Red Hat’s partnership with Google for cloud services, trends in application modernization, and customer concerns about compliance requirements and data regulation when moving to a new infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Data regulation is among the concerns

For businesses that are currently making decisions about which workloads to move to the cloud, a challenge is to look at aspects of compliance and data regulation, according to Balakrishnan.

“You’ve got to figure it out: What compliance do I need? … What are the data regulations? What is the data I’m going to be setting? Is it going to meet the data submitted rules that my country or my [geography] has?” he said. “I’ve got to make sure I worry about that.”

Another point of attention for companies is to ensure that developers will not be confused by this more complex infrastructure. Businesses usually want to provide developers with a consistent way to build their applications without worrying about the footprint they are serving, according to Balakrishnan.

Red Hat has Open Innovation Labs to help customers in this journey.

“Whether they take a small project, they figured out how to change things,” Balakrishnan explained. “Not only learn how to change things from a technology standpoint, but also learn how to culturally change things, because a lot of these things are not just moving from one infrastructure to another, but also learning how to do things differently.”

Choices in the cloud environment, including the migration of critical applications and data centers, must also be related to companies’ business plans. “I think customers really have to look at: What are the ID and technology strategy? You’ve got to figure out: What are your business needs? Do you need to be more agile? Do you need to enter new businesses? Those are kind of important things,” Balakrishnan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next OnAir event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE