As the pandemic nears an end, the need for a virtual ecosystem that can serve the public without unnecessary face-to-face interactions will continue on.

Digital transformation is no longer optional as several enterprises scramble to transfer their workloads to the cloud as the digital economy takes its hold. Deloitte Consulting LLP recently worked with Red Hat Inc. to combine open-source technologies and industry expertise to assist organizations in their hybrid cloud journey.

“Innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength,” said Dave Knight (pictured, right), Red Hat relationship lead at Deloitte. “We also are firm believers in open source to the degree that our customers like to leverage that to drive their journeys, and we’re seeing that, especially in the public sector space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ.”

Knight and Mark Bourgeois (pictured, left), public sector managing director at Deloitte Consulting, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent Red Hat Summit. They discussed Deloitte’s partnership with Red Hat, using open-source technology to assist cloud hybrid journeys, the future of hybrid cloud and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Transformation through innovation

One of the highest demand transformation needs is a desire to adopt innovative technologies, as well as moving workloads to the cloud, according to Bourgeois.

“I believe the key to success and embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open-source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned,” Bourgeois said. “We can rely on Kubernetes to auto scale and then get rid of those instances when workload demands have been resolved.”

Deloitte works closely with each of its individual customers to find a solution that fits them personally. One such example of a successful client is the State of Washington, a Deloitte client since 2012.

“The agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership,” Bourgeois stated. “We worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API management and integration platforms.”

The result was a platform that offered auto-scaling integration tools and out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities overseeing the health of the solution. 

Hybrid cloud is the next wave of the cloud, according to Knight.

“A lot of customers have been in hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting to the cloud,” he said. “Customers are starting to ask me more and more about hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons. The easy workloads have either been moved or are being moved, or there’s a strategy and a plan to get them moved.”

Bourgeois agreed that hybrid is evolving. “Eight years ago, hybrid was consuming an address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that. But today I do agree that hybrid cloud is all about a vehicle, a way of moving workloads across data centers,” he explained. “It’s an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers.”

Red Hat’s investments are assisting Deloitte in advancing these solutions, creating a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment to validate reference architectures. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE