Many organizations are discovering that digital initiatives are quietly increasing complexity and cost. As IT footprints grow across cloud, on-premises, and edge, leaders are rethinking how they manage their environments.

Recent research highlights this shift:

• 58% of IT leaders in Foundry’s 2025 CIO Tech Poll say AI technologies will change how they manage IT infrastructure.
• 69% of IT leaders in Foundry’s 2026 State of the CIO study expect their IT budgets to increase, largely to address security improvements and infrastructure modernization.
• Red Hat’s 2024 Global Tech Trends study found that technical debt is the #1 barrier to successful digital transformation.

Standardization, starting with the operating environment, helps you:

• Reduce complexity and technical debt by consolidating systems, tools, and platforms.
• Strengthen security with consistent policies, automated controls, and better visibility across the stack.
• Improve agility by making it easier to deploy, scale, and manage applications across hybrid environments.
• Free up budget and talent currently tied up in maintaining fragmented environments, so teams can focus on AI, customer experience, and other innovation priorities.

In short, standardization helps you reshape your IT foundation so it’s easier to secure, operate, and evolve as your business and AI initiatives grow.

Standardization gives you a more predictable, manageable environment, which directly supports both security and technical debt reduction.

On the security side:

• Fragmented systems and “hidden” applications are harder to patch and monitor, creating misconfigurations and openings for attackers.
• A standardized platform with AI-powered management tools makes it easier to apply and enforce consistent security policies across the organization.
• Automated controls, proactive analytics, and vulnerability alerts are simpler to implement and maintain when you’re not dealing with many different platforms and one-off configurations.
• A security-first software supply chain is easier to maintain when you’re working from a common operating environment.

As Red Hat’s Julio Pelegrino notes, “When you standardize, you simplify. When you simplify, you have more control of the risk your organization is exposed to.”

On the technical debt side:

• Technology sprawl, especially across cloud services, drives up the cost of deployment, maintenance, and training.
• Investing more time and money in keeping legacy or fragmented environments running increases technical debt and crowds out funding for new capabilities like AI.
• Standardization lets you consolidate systems and applications, streamlining daily maintenance and support.
• Centralized development environments and standard configurations improve interoperability, so teams can deliver services faster and focus more on customer-driven innovation.

The net effect is a more secure, more manageable environment that gradually reduces technical debt while creating capacity for higher-value work.

Most organizations find it effective to start with the operating environment, then expand from there using a phased, automated approach.

1. Begin with the operating system (OS)

• Different OS types or even different Linux distributions can handle workloads, containers, and databases in unique ways, adding complexity and risk.
• A standardized operating environment helps you:
  • Increase uptime and accelerate provisioning and deployment.
  • Improve IT and user productivity with consistent tools and processes.
  • Optimize operational efficiency across all workloads.
  • Gain better visibility into the environment across the organization.
• As Pelegrino puts it: if you don’t standardize on the OS first, you risk misalignment and wasted effort building applications and automation for multiple platforms.

2. Sequence changes to minimize disruption

• Start with applications that are at end-of-support, need major updates, or are candidates for retirement.
• Then move to smaller workloads (for example, those running on fewer than five OS instances) to build momentum and a track record of successful consolidations.
• This rolling approach frees developer capacity for larger migrations over time.

3. Use automation to scale standardization

• Automation is now a checklist capability for modern operating environments because it streamlines the path from development to production.
• Standard configurations are essential for scaling automation across the enterprise.
• A practical example: Salesforce migrated 200,000 machines from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux using automation-driven tools (conversion playbooks, an orchestrator system, and configuration management). Automation helped them avoid downtime, maintain system health, and complete the migration ahead of the legacy OS end-of-support date.
• AI, including generative AI, can further enhance this by generating automation playbooks and documentation, and by powering operational chatbots that guide rollouts based on internal best practices.

By starting with the OS, sequencing changes thoughtfully, and leaning on automation, you can reimagine your IT foundation in a way that reduces risk, controls cost, and supports faster innovation.