The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Experience: Discover the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for your organization

Linux® is the de facto standard for developing and running innovative, reliable, and critical workloads in hybrid and multicloud environments.

Choosing the right Linux distribution for your organization is crucial, whether you are deploying essential business services, developing innovative applications, or adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). And your choice of operating system is even more strategic when moving to the cloud. Your operating system forms the foundation for your entire hybrid and multicloud environment—security, management, portability, and lifecycle planning start with the operating system.

Standardizing on a single operating foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can greatly simplify your path to the cloud, as well as ongoing operations. Rather than splitting infrastructure and management into multiple domains, your teams can use a single set of tools and platforms to deploy, run, secure, and move applications and workloads across multiple footprints.

Even so, not all operating systems offer the features, capabilities, and resources needed to operate effectively and efficiently in hybrid and multicloud environments. Consistency, security, manageability, interoperability, and support across your entire environment are critical for making the most of your cloud investments.

This e-book explores the value of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux for your organization and the experience you can expect to have as a Red Hat customer.

No matter where your IT journey leads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable foundation for untold innovation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help you build an efficient, security-focused foundation for innovation across hybrid and multicloud environments. This trusted, cloud-ready operating system provides a consistent, tailored experience across footprints—including physical, virtualized, hybrid cloud, multicloud, and even edge infrastructure. As a result, your teams can develop, deploy, and run your applications on the right infrastructure at all times.

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for both on-site datacenter and cloud environments can help you improve productivity, security, flexibility, and operational efficiency as you move to the cloud and adapt to a more digital world.

Red Hat is the largest open source company in the world, with more than 30 years of experience creating enterprise open source software that aligns with our customers’ needs. Our open business model focuses on collaboration and partnership to bring vendors, customers, and communities together.

As a trusted advisor and contributor to key open source communities, we assess customer needs, shape projects accordingly, and contribute all code back to the community to ensure interoperability and broad adoption. We work with a large ecosystem of partners to deliver diverse innovative, validated, integrated solutions across use cases. And we build collaborative relationships with our customers to ensure that your requirements are incorporated into Red Hat products. Plan ahead for new technology investments and adoption with advance visibility into upcoming features and influence over development. Plus, we support your business goals over time as your requirements and technology evolve, giving you the continuity you need to succeed.

1.  Strengthen your security and compliance strategy

Gain confidence with straightforward, comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that work across environments.

Red Hat has developed and delivered security-focused open source software for more than 30 years. Security is a critical priority in our own software development practices and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is built via a trusted, tested software supply chain.

No matter your industry or public sector organization, standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the consistency needed to maintain a security-focused, production-ready hybrid cloud environment. Meet high security and compliance expectations with built-in features like live kernel patching, security profiles, and standards certification. Reduce your attack surface and protect your systems in the cloud with a modular package structure. Configure your systems for increased security from the start with best practice-based default settings. And adopt zero trust architectures more easily with an included identity management tool.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also includes Red Hat Insights, a set of hosted services that helps you manage your IT systems everywhere to improve IT efficiency and consistency. Simplify security operations with risk identification, assessment, and remediation recommendations for all of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Maintain compliance with policies and requirements over time with tracking and guidance across your environments.

Finally, the Red Hat Product Security team monitors, identifies, and addresses risks and provides tools and data to help measure security. Safeguard your environment with automated tools, regular updates and patch releases, and accessible expertise.

2. Get support for your IT and business objectives

Keep your business up and running with less hassle through access to both proactive and reactive expert support.

When you choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you gain valuable support for your business objectives and your ongoing IT operations. No matter where you deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you’re backed by our award-winning support organization. Meet the needs of different teams—and your budget—with multiple levels of support. For example, select cost-efficient self-support for development systems and premium 24x7 support for critical production systems. Our support teams work closely with our engineering and product teams, as well as our partners, to solve issues quickly and with less hassle for you. Specialty-based routing ensures support calls and tickets go directly to the right experts. 

We also take learnings from support cases and compile them into helpful documentation on the Red Hat Customer Portal. Access reference architectures, best practices, product documentation, videos, collaborative discussions, labs, and tools via the online portal. Above and beyond support and sharing best practices, the portal delivers information about ongoing security vulnerabilities and the critical steps it takes to mitigate their impact. As a result, you can spend less time solving support issues and refocus staff on more strategic tasks.

Finally, we offer consulting services to help you achieve your business outcomes in less time. Take advantage of our experience to modernize your IT, deliver cloud-native applications, or adopt automation to maximize the value of your IT investments. Or engage a Technical Account Manager (TAM) for a consistent single point of contact for technical advice and support.

3. Save time while gaining operational control

Streamline day-to-day administration with a consistent and repeatable management experience.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a consistent and repeatable management experience with automated workflows, intuitive web-based administration, integrated tools, and image mode (Technology Preview). Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets you use the same set of management tools and processes to administer your entire environment, saving time and effort. 

Included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to streamline operational tasks. It gathers configuration and utilization data from your Red Hat products, analyzes the data based on Red Hat knowledge and expertise, and generates prioritized insights and recommendations for you to take action. With a focus on operations, security, and business outcomes, it proactively alerts administrators and stakeholders before an outage, security event, or overspending occurs. Create and maintain a standardized operating environment with less effort. Simplify software patching and updates. Identify and reduce security, compliance, and malware risks. Improve IT efficiency and stability. And optimize workload performance and costs in the cloud. Insights works across on-site and cloud environments, so you can manage everything from a single interface.

A collection of Ansible® automation content included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, system roles let you automate many common administrative tasks. Ensure repeatable configuration across multiple systems, streamline daily system administration, and execute system management tasks consistently across your IT infrastructure. You can also deploy Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to provision, patch, configure, and control your development, test, and production systems at scale.

4. Plan IT lifecycles on your terms

Support your business and IT schedules with flexible, stable, and security-focused lifecycle options. 

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can choose from multiple supported versions, upgrade on your schedule, and adopt new features as you need them. Red Hat maintains a consistent kernel version for each major release and its associated minor releases, ensuring application and hardware stability for the entire release life span. Plan your IT lifecycles on your schedule with 10 years of updates and support for major releases, 2-4 years of updates and support for minor releases, and documented interfaces between releases.

Red Hat also provides detailed guidance and simple-to-use tools to help you upgrade your operating system. Leapp is a supported tool used to perform in-place system upgrades between major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Upgrade with confidence and benefit from the latest features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux without having to reinstall your systems. A pre-upgrade analysis provides application compatibility and remediation guidance. Once you are ready, Leapp can perform the upgrade in minutes while maintaining your customizations, configurations, and preferences.

Finally, accelerate your upgrade projects with Red Hat Consulting services or ecosystem partners. Our experts work with your organization to develop the practices, tools, and culture needed to speed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrade process and reduce risk for critical applications and workloads. 

5. Build an environment that fits your organization’s needs

Run the applications your business relies on with a consistent, high-performance, and manageable foundation.

Red Hat partners with industry-leading hardware, software, and cloud vendors to give you more choice, innovation, and stability. We curate the most useful, reliable, and future-ready partner applications, products, and services to create a robust ecosystem. Each partner offering is tested and validated to perform on Red Hat platforms across multiple use cases. Detailed certification policies increase compatibility and stable operation. We also work closely with ecosystem partners to certify their latest releases on an ongoing basis. As a result, you can choose your preferred cloud vendors, applications, platforms, and integrated technologies and services with confidence that they will work together reliably. For example, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP databases and applications, Intel and Arm processors, and Dell Technologies and HPE servers are all certified for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And our extensive work with hardware partners makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux a natural choice for modern, high-performance workloads like AI data preparation, model training and inferencing.

Run your applications with confidence on major public clouds, as well as more than 1,400 regional clouds. Purchase and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces, or use subscriptions bought from Red Hat in your cloud of choice. Plus, you can take advantage of your cloud providers’ committed spend and advance purchase programs for discounted pricing and flexible payment options for Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances.

6. Equip your developers for ongoing success

Streamline application development and reduce launch issues with a common platform for development, test, and production.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers access to a curated set of stable, high-quality toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes that streamline the path from development to production, no matter where developers work. Developers can take advantage of the latest stable versions of the languages, tools, and databases they need—without compromising support for production applications and teams that require older versions—via Application Streams. Each application stream is maintained and supported for a defined lifecycle via a security-focused software supply chain approach, so users can use these components with confidence and plan upgrades accordingly.

We also offer developer-specific resources, programs, and subscriptions to help your organization develop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux more easily and cost-effectively. The Red Hat Developer program provides no-cost individual subscriptions, tools, technologies, and a community of builders to help solve problems, connect with colleagues, stay current, and lead your projects forward. Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams—available for specific development use cases at no cost to qualifying Red Hat customer organizations—includes no-cost subscriptions and access to Red Hat Developer e-books, cheatsheets, and other useful content. As a result, you can cost-effectively build and test applications on the same innovative and reliable platform used for your production workloads.

7. Reduce your total cost of ownership

Maximize your return on investment with support, tools, certifications, and resources that streamline operations.

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets you apply expert support, management tools, security and partner certifications, and customer resources across your systems. This value adds up to lower overall costs compared to non-paid open source Linux distributions. In fact, organizations that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux experience:

We also work with our cloud partners to help you make the most of your cloud budget. Obtain subscriptions from Red Hat and use them in your cloud of choice via Red Hat Cloud Access. Buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from cloud provider consoles and marketplaces, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Or use your cloud provider committed spend and discount programs. For example, you can apply your AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), Azure Hybrid Benefit, and Google Cloud committed use discounts (CUDs) to the cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. Finally, you can take advantage of the Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend program for discounted pricing and flexible payment options across your datacenter and cloud providers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the stable foundation for innovation.

Your business relies on your IT infrastructure. The right operating system can help you boost performance, improve security, speed development, and prepare for the future. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you the freedom and flexibility to innovate rapidly across hybrid environments without leaving your existing workloads and applications behind. No matter where your IT is headed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is there to support your organization and business goals on your journey.

Discover what Red Hat Enterprise Linux can do for your organization.