For many, the discussion is not “should I use the public cloud?”; rather it is “how and when do I leverage the public cloud?”. This is not a boolean decision, there is no need to turn off your existing data center simply because you have decided to adopt the public cloud. Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud strategies are increasingly common — identify your subset of workloads that you consider reasonable for public cloud, determine if moving to a public cloud will provide cost benefits (e.g., periodic or “bursty” workloads), and expand your operation to the public cloud for just those workloads.

Generally, there are three concerns to be addressed in selecting workloads: cost, performance, and security/compliance.

Cost and performance requirements are fairly quantitative, and relatively easy to analyze.

But there is a real challenge in maintaining a consistent security and compliance posture across this expanded infrastructure. Whether moving 1 or 2 workloads to the public cloud or 90% of your infrastructure, the ability to maintain security patches, apply consistent access control, generate compliance reports, and detect and apply configuration changes is critical.

We have a great set of sessions lined up in our Security Track at Red Hat Summit this year, addressing these concerns and more. “Compliance, security automation, and remediation with Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, and Ansible Tower by Red Hat” will provide guidance on maintaining a consistent compliance posture across private and public cloud, “Identity management for cloud and hybrid cloud environments with Red Hat and Microsoft” will discuss maintaining uniform identity between Azure Active Directory Domain Services and your Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, and “Middleware security: Authentication, authorization, and auditing services” will introduce our new Single Sign-On solution based on Keycloak for Federated Authorization across your applications, regardless of where they are hosted.

I will be blogging and tweeting (@rhmjs) all through Summit. And if you are joining us in San Francisco, please make sure to come find me at the Red Hat Booth! Hope to see you there!