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Sponsored Content:
Refocusing Government
Possibility
with Open Hybrid Cloud
Christopher Smith
Vice President and General Manager,
North American Public Sector, Red Hat
Today, there’s no doubt that the cloud is facilitating the future of public service. The government is turning to open hybrid cloud for faster speeds, enhanced cybersecurity, and the level of stability and consistency that allows IT staffs to be trained in principles that stand the test of time.
While cloud is seeing its heyday now, for Christopher Smith, vice president and general manager of North American Public Sector at Red Hat, the journey into cloud began before it was cool — back in the late 1990s. At that time, Smith began to pivot away from years in top-tier government consulting to join the technology side of the industry and step into the promise of helping build a wildly more connected world.
“I was good at it, and I enjoyed it,” Smith recalls of his previous career focus. “But I saw this wave: The internet was coming of age. And I recognized that while professional services consulting was great, I wanted to get on board with where the world was going.”
Today, Smith is still riding that wave. He and his team are on a refocused mission to help government agencies tap into the possibilities of automation made possible in an open hybrid cloud environment.
To do so, they’ve armed themselves — and their government partners — with a number of industry-transforming tools: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, extends open source operating system technologies to government and business while Ansible Automation Platform allows users to share and reuse automation across projects and teams — all while bypassing lengthy manual configurations and realizing cost and time savings. Further, the Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform provides cloud-like experiences everywhere it’s deployed — including at the edge and on-premises.
With the technologies, expertise, and passion that Smith and his team at Red Hat bring to the table, he’s excited to continue helping agencies transform, envision the future, and meet the mission — both today and tomorrow.
“But I saw this wave: The internet was coming of age. And I recognized that while professional services consulting was great, I wanted to get on board with where the world was going.”
— Christopher Smith, Vice President and General Manager, North American Public Sector, Red Hat
Building Consistency From Cloud to Edge
But delving into the cloud is easier said than done, of course. For most organizations, creating an open hybrid cloud environment isn’t a day one approach, Smith says. Instead, it’s a journey. Building trust in that journey is paramount, and Smith says it factors heavily into Red Hat’s layered security approach, which includes a baseline configuration and automation that unlock zero trust strategies and policies alongside Red Hat’s extensive partner ecosystem.
Nearly every government agency and service has monolithic mission applications that leaders have been reluctant to migrate to the cloud. Many remain on premise. Some stay there for obvious reasons of national security, Smith says.
“But there are core applications that are built on old legacy code that are great candidates for modernization,” he adds, “and the efficiencies and cost savings associated with that are what every federal customer is looking for right now.”
Building hybrid cloud on a foundation of open source code allows for addressing key customer pain points, including disjointed architectures and technologies as well as skills silos and inconsistent security and governance implementations, Smith says. For warfighters, civilian agencies and others looking to access data at the edge — in mobile, distributed or rugged environments — application deployment pipelines can be created using the same software layers that are adopted in data centers and on the cloud.
“The software stack is very consistent from data center to cloud to edge, and data can flow seamlessly and appropriately from edge to cloud and vice versa,” Smith says. “From a mission perspective, enabling edge capabilities can deliver data quicker and more seamlessly.”
“But there are core applications that are built on old legacy code that are great candidates for modernization, and the efficiencies and cost savings associated with that are what every federal customer is looking for right now.”
— Christopher Smith, Vice President and General Manager, North American Public Sector, Red Hat
From Childhood Football Fantasies to Federal Successes
Smith speaks from a depth of experience when he discusses IT architecture. Although his dream as an adolescent was to play professional football, Upon graduation from high school he quickly turned his ambitions toward working in some way with the federal government. In high school, he grew to love civics class. And at home, he nurtured a burgeoning interest in current events as his father taught him over breakfast each morning how to quickly absorb the most important information in the daily newspaper. Eventually, Smith studied at George Washington University, where he earned a master’s degree in public administration. Instead of working in government though, he found himself supporting it in ways he still considers incredibly rewarding today. His first opportunity to work in technology came while supporting a knowledge management contract with the Navy. “I’ve never really wanted to work anywhere else besides supporting the government,” Smith says. “The diversity of experiences that you get in the federal space has always anchored me here. One minute, you can be in the D.C. area talking to the Navy about back-office applications and later that day down at [Patuxent] River talking about common control systems to support unmanned aerial vehicles.” That diversity of rewarding experiences continued to grow later at IBM. There, he led a team that developed a massive data governance strategy that laid the technological groundwork necessary for health care providers across the nation to move from paper-based to digital records — a key component of the foundation necessary for migrating previously uninsured people into insurance under the Affordable Care Act. “The most rewarding thing about working with the federal government is knowing you’re positioning and collaborating with customers and then seeing that change have an impact,” Smith says. “Seeing 20 million people get health care that had never had it before is a really good feeling.”“The most rewarding thing about working with the federal government is knowing you’re positioning and collaborating with customers and then seeing that change have an impact.”
— Christopher Smith, Vice President and General Manager, North American Public Sector, Red Hat
Small Biz and New Biz
Over his career, Smith has had a couple of small businesses and appreciates the entrepreneurial mindset. That was what drew him to Red Hat even as he watched the company grow from afar over the years. The company’s pillars of freedom, collaboration, courage and accountability align the personal values he says are important to him. Now, Red Hat is on the cusp of transformation for growth and scalability as it works to support customers increasingly interested in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud capabilities. “Simplicity is going to be our key moving forward,” Smith says. “With our partner ecosystem, we’re focused on a co-creation motion where we’re enabling our business partners on top of our platforms with the value propositions and solutions that they need as we grow deeper and more entrenched with our customers.” Learn more about how RedHat is helping to move cloud innovation forward for government.Click here to learn more about RedHat
