British Army Migrates To Red Hat Cloud For Faster Application Delivery

The British Army has migrated its private cloud infrastructure to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to deliver applications more quickly, reduce downtime and meet the needs of end users.

The Army’s Information Application Services (IAS) team is using Ansible Tower by Red Hat to more efficiently deliver applications, hosting and web services that support the 19,000 soldiers and their families deployed in more than 27 countries across the globe.

This will also provide a more simplified management process, along with increased automation capabilities.

Cloud march

The IAS team has applications running on two primary hosting environments: A joint server farm hosted in a private cloud and a private hosting environment consisting of two private clouds to store secure data.

Previously, they were experiencing support and compatibility issues that were resulting in unplanned downtime and delayed updates.

This prompted the migration to Red Hat and a move from a physical infrastructure to a software-defined data centre consisting of five database servers and two applications servers.

“We want to deliver software quicker and more efficiently to meet the end users’ requirements and we absolutely made the right choice with Ansible,” said Lt Col. Dorian Seabrook, head of operations, IAS Branch, British Army. “It works for us on a number of levels, and the adoption throughout the organisation is now starting to really take hold.

“Previously, communicating the delivery timescales for large projects could be quite stressful. Now, in most cases, we’re delivering quicker than the users can actually absorb the changes. Our users are just staggered by the agility and the turnaround time and what we can now offer them.”

The move from the British Army comes as organisations in all shapes and sizes continue to embrace the capabilities of the cloud to provide technical and operational benefits.

Virgin Trains, for example, recently rolled out Box to drive employee collaboration and HSBC has turned to Google’s cloud for big data, analytics and machine learning services.

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