In delivering business advantages in today’s digital landscape, organisations must shift their IT to become faster, more efficient and agile in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to application development and deployment. This is because as organisations continue to digitally transform, software becomes an integral component of every part of their business and they will be expected to deliver applications and services much faster than ever before.

Containerisation will allow them to achieve the level of agility required. Accelerating application delivery with containers can also satisfy the needs of various stakeholders and teams within the organisation.

For example, the IT and operations side of the business may require new applications to be developed faster and the frequency that new features and fixes are delivered to production to be accelerated. They also have to ensure systems are stable and secure and at the same time, speed up their ability to react to increasing demands through automation – all while driving down costs. For application developers, they may need automated workflows and easy versioning for continuous delivery and integration.

There has been a lot of talk about how containers are becoming a necessary technology in the new era of DevOps, multi-cloud and automation. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that its adoption has increased significantly. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organisations will be running containerised applications in production, up from less than 30% today.

Some of the biggest benefits that containerisation can bring to your business include:

• Flexibility and Portability: Gone are the days when most or all of your software are run in a single, physical location (either in your office or data centre), with fairly standardised hardware and OS. These days, you have to think about on-prem, virtual, clouds, mobile and the expanding edge. Containerised applications can move freely among all of these different locations (without needing significant adjustments to the code), giving you much greater flexibility and the ability to minimise lock-ins. Most importantly, containerisation is one of the best ways to modernise those legacy applications and move them to the cloud.

• Lightweight and Less Overhead: VMs are great but containers consume far fewer resources and provide OS-level virtualisation that allows you to support more application instances on your host computers. The lightweight and portable nature of containers make them the ideal operating environment for microservices – where incremental changes to applications can be pushed out quickly and easily – enabling organisations to become more agile.

• Improved Productivity, Efficiency and Consistency: Containers enable automated application builds, deployments, scaling and management, making it easier for development and operations to develop, deploy and manage apps. With containers, you can also embrace the “write once, run anywhere” approach for all your applications and enjoy a consistent runtime environment no matter where they are deployed. This will save a lot of time and effort for your IT teams, which can be spent on innovation and building other areas of the business.

If you are looking to modernise your IT and enjoy these benefits, you have to start looking at implementing containers within your business. But what is the best way to do that?

First of all, you need a solid, container-ready foundation to support your modern and agile business operations. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can provide you with this foundation, one that is intelligent, stable and secure. With RHEL, you’ll have the infrastructure and tools that will allow you to simplify container development and deployment as it supplies a lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit with everything you need to get started.

This enterprise-grade Linux operating system is included in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, along with container runtime, networking, monitoring, container registry, authentication and authorisation solutions. It is the kind of trusted platform that you need in order to deliver new applications or containerise and migrate existing ones to the cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift provides developers with an optimal platform for provisioning, building and deploying applications and their components in a self-service fashion and integrates with continuous integration and delivery tools. For IT operations, it delivers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that provides policy-based control and automation for container-based applications in production. Hence, Red Hat OpenShift is able to meet both IT teams’ and application developers’ needs and stands out as a leading choice for customers who want a more secure and supported container platform.

Click here to find out more about how you can have a consistent, multi-cloud foundation for building and running containerised applications.