The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has chosen Red Hat to architect a unified AI and hybrid cloud spine throughout its complete property. Introduced at the moment, the settlement is designed to interrupt down knowledge silos and speed up the deployment of AI fashions from the info centre to the tactical edge.
For CIOs, it’s a part of a broader transfer away from fragmented and project-specific AI pilots towards a extra platform engineering method. By standardising on Crimson Hat’s infrastructure, the MOD goals to decouple its AI capabilities from underlying {hardware}, permitting algorithms to be developed as soon as and deployed anyplace—whether or not on-premise, within the cloud, or on disconnected area units.
Crimson Hat industrialises the AI lifecycle for the MOD
The settlement focuses on the Defence Digital Foundry, the MOD’s central software program supply hub. The Foundry will now present a constant MLOps setting to all service branches, together with the Royal Navy, British Military, and Royal Air Power.
On the core of this initiative is Crimson Hat AI, a collection that features Crimson Hat OpenShift AI. This platform addresses a well-known bottleneck in enterprise AI: the “inference hole” between knowledge science groups and operational infrastructure.
The brand new settlement will permit MOD builders to collaborate on a single platform, selecting essentially the most applicable AI fashions and {hardware} accelerators for his or her particular mission necessities with out being locked right into a single vendor’s ecosystem.
This standardisation is important for “enabling AI at scale,” in accordance with Crimson Hat. By unifying disparate efforts, the MOD intends to scale back the duplication that usually plagues massive authorities IT packages. The platform helps optimised inference, guaranteeing that AI fashions can run effectively on restricted {hardware} footprints typically present in army environments.
Mivy James, CTO on the UK MOD, mentioned: “Easing entry to Crimson Hat platforms turns into all of the extra necessary for the UK Ministry of Defence within the period of AI, the place fast adoption, replicating good follow, and the flexibility to scale are crucial to strategic benefit.”
Bridging legacy and autonomous methods
A significant hurdle for defence modernisation is the coexistence of legacy virtualised workloads with trendy, containerised AI purposes. The settlement contains Crimson Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which offers a “well-lit migration path” for current methods. This enables the MOD to handle conventional digital machines alongside new neural networks on the identical management airplane to scale back operational complexity and value.
The MOD deal additionally incorporates Crimson Hat Ansible Automation Platform to drive enterprise-wide AI automation. In an AI context, automation is the enforcement mechanism for governance. It ensures that as fashions are retrained and redeployed, the underlying configuration administration, safety orchestration, and repair provisioning stay compliant with rigorous defence requirements.
Safety and ecosystem alignment
Deploying AI in defence naturally requires a “constant safety footprint” that may stand up to refined cyber threats.
The Crimson Hat platform permits DevSecOps practices, integrating safety gates straight into the software program provide chain. That is significantly related for sustaining a trusted software program pedigree when integrating code from permitted third-party suppliers, who can now align their deliverables with the MOD’s standardised Crimson Hat setting.
Joanna Hodgson, Regional Supervisor for the UK and Eire at Crimson Hat, commented: “Crimson Hat gives flexibility and scalability to deploy any software or any AI mannequin on their alternative of {hardware} – whether or not on premise, in any cloud, or on the edge – serving to the UK Ministry of Defence to harness the most recent applied sciences, together with AI.”
The deployment reveals that AI maturity is shifting past the mannequin itself to the infrastructure that helps it. Success in high-stakes environments like defence relies upon much less on particular person algorithm efficiency and extra on the flexibility to reliably ship, replace, and govern these fashions at scale.
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