The development, convergence and mobility of modern information technology (IT) is challenging companies to have more agile systems.

This may require more use of open IT standards to enable movement into and out of cloud services, says international open source IT company RedHat southern Europe, Middle East and Africa VP Michel Isnard.

There is a need for cloud hosting, co-location and Internet service providers to enable customers to use the technology that they want to use and create heterogeneous ecosystems that increase flexibility and movement between private and public cloud platforms, he says.

“Hybrid cloud models are attractive because companies can maintain internal, private cloud ecosystems and can move certain functions or storage into and out of a public cloud when more capacity is required or reduce costs by outsourcing certain functions.”

Open IT standards and open-source IT resources are well placed to facilitate modern flexible and scalable IT environments. They are mature technologies, enabling companies to use robust and well-supported open-source IT platforms, while reducing vendor lock-in, licensing and storage costs through resource pooling, thereby freeing up available resources.

“IT developers tend to spend time working within the constraints of a given operating system and fixing bugs between legacy systems that clash with inelastic IT platforms and systems, rather than developing applications to boost a busi-ness’s performance.

“However, using an enterprise-grade open stack (a set of open-source software programs) means that they can focus on developing programs and applications for the business at lower costs, owing to the subscription model common to open-source IT companies and the open source programming standards,” says Isnard.

RedHat specialises in providing predefined open-source software platforms for companies, Internet service providers, co-location and cloud services, which the companies and their customers can then change as they require.

Further, the company provides its services on a yearly subscription model and provides regular updates for the systems using its in-house developers and input from profes- sional user communities, which demonstrates the powerful crowd-sourcing effect of open-source development.

“Open source is an approach to IT systems that emphasises the adaptability, flexibility, mobility and customisation of any part of the platform and software. “Companies can determine their own IT environments and develop programs that will improve their business functionality as and when they need to.”

Meanwhile, open standards also enable com- panies to integrate many disparate IT systems, including legacy systems and legacy infra-structure, to use existing assets longer and incor-porate new technologies as they emerge.