The power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Why your OS choice shapes your business
Your operating system (OS) determines how far your organization can go. It’s not just software running in the background. An OS is the strategic layer that underpins every application, every service, and every digital initiative on which your business depends.
Behind the scenes, your OS is responsible for delivering the performance, reliability, and security your workloads demand. It manages everything from maximizing power and performance to threading, logging, and enforcing security controls.
As businesses adopt hybrid and multicloud architectures more frequently, the OS powers the development and use of AI technology, workload orchestration, cloud portability, and consistent data governance across environments.
Unify your IT infrastructure with the right OS
For today’s IT leaders, choosing the right OS is more important than ever. The OS is the layer that determines how easily an organization can innovate, adapt, scale, and maintain consistency across all environments—whether running on physical servers, virtual machines, public or private clouds, or at the edge.
As AI, data infrastructure, and digital sovereignty reshape the software landscape, open source offers a clear strategic advantage and is emerging as a core pillar of future business strategy. In fact, 83% of organizations believe open source is valuable to their organization's future success.1
To benefit from these shifts, organizations need an OS that can adapt to different environments, provide operational efficiencies, and simplify management—supporting automation, accelerated deployments, and innovation necessary for modern application lifecycles.
Linux delivers this flexibility. It provides a common foundation that can be tailored to different workloads, environments, and organizational needs. This is why Linux—and the open source model behind it—has become the standard for modern enterprise computing.
Linux: The open standard for enterprise innovation
Open source operating systems like Linux offer a level of flexibility, control, and innovation potential that proprietary systems cannot match. Enterprise innovation is why Linux—both commercial and community versions—is projected to represent 89% of the overall OS market by 2029.2
For organizations evaluating their long-term IT strategy, an open source OS provides 3 core advantages, including increased innovation, reliability, and flexibility, in comparison to closed source systems.
For IT leaders, innovation capabilities, stability, security, performance, support, and compatibility are what make a server OS valuable. Linux is often better positioned to excel in these areas because of its open source nature, allowing for a higher level of customization.3
Linux powers today’s hybrid cloud environments, running consistently across both on-premise datacenters and public clouds—a setup used by 73% of organizations.4 At the same time, it has become the platform of choice for accelerating innovation with emerging technologies such as AI workloads.
To fully realize Linux’s potential in the enterprise, many organizations rely on commercial distributions that deliver enhanced security, reliability, and support.
Why commercial Linux matters for enterprise IT
Linux is the open standard for enterprise innovation, but not all Linux is created equal. Relying on raw community-sourced software introduces significant risk. To manage risk and complexity, the most successful organizations mitigate the potential downsides of community-sourced software by adopting platforms enhanced for security, compliance, and third-party certifications by an enterprise vendor.
As commercial Linux becomes the fastest-growing segment of the market through 20295, more organizations are choosing these enterprise-ready platforms for their proven reliability and security capabilities.
Backed by 30 years of expertise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the trusted standard for predictable performance, delivering a consistent experience across on-premise, cloud, and edge environments.
Chapter 1: What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers an enterprise-grade platform that is built on 30 years of open source community leadership and customer experience, offering a foundation that instills confidence and drastically reduces risk.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified for use with hundreds of cloud environments and with thousands of software and hardware vendors.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a security-hardened foundation to accelerate innovation and adoption of advanced technologies like containerization, virtualization, and cloud-native capabilities while bringing consistency across hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Available across every major public cloud—including Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud—and more than 1,400 regional cloud providers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you consistent performance, security, and support wherever you run.
Given this broad ecosystem, how does Red Hat Enterprise Linux help organizations simplify operations and keep pace with rapid change?
Tackling complexity with an innovative OS platform
One of the greatest challenges organizations face is finding an OS that provides the consistency and flexibility needed to manage the growing complexities of modern IT practices across your entire IT environment.
From navigating skills gaps and geopolitical concerns to complex integration, IT leaders need a solution that they can trust.
By delivering consistency across your IT environment and its various infrastructures, including physical, virtual, private and public cloud environments, and edge deployments Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies how you manage your applications, workloads, and services with the same tools, no matter the location.
Facing critical challenges like Linux talent shortages, demands for data sovereignty, and complex hybrid cloud integration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides built-in tools and intelligent
capabilities to deliver enterprise security and accelerate time to value on critical business workloads.
Among numerous other benefits, existing customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux have achieved a host of operational improvements in comparison to unpaid open source solutions, according to independent research from IDC6 .
Reliable and security-focused IT environment
72% less unplanned downtime.6
Consistency and efficiency
32% more efficient IT infrastructure teams.6
Lower operational costs
$172K saved in cloud infrastructure costs per organization per year.6
Speed up time to value
23% faster development life cycle for new applications.6
20% more productive development teams.6
Learn why using Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support business activities will provide a $1.7 trillion boost to customers in increased revenue and resource optimization.6
Chapter 2: The value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
As your organization looks for the right OS to simplify today’s complexities and boost innovation—it is important to note that, in addition to the extensive benefits a Linux OS can provide, it also requires the right tools and support to ensure it is properly managed.
As the platform that underpins the full Red Hat portfolio, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription delivers built-in flexibility, proactive security and compliance, streamlined management, and the operational efficiency modern IT teams need. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you gain a consistent foundation—supported every step of the way.
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can benefit from:
Get more information on what is included in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.
Flexibility across IT environments, versions, and costs
Every organization has unique needs and requirements that demand a tailored IT environment. However, this customization must not exceed support and cost constraints, especially as cloud strategies evolve.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers a stable, consistent experience wherever your workloads run.
Your subscription gives you the operational and financial flexibility needed to modernize with confidence, providing:
Operate confidently with proactive security
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed with security at its core, helping organizations reduce risk and maintain compliance without disruption. It aligns with leading security frameworks—including zero trust principles—keeping your environment continuously monitored and protected.
By combining expert security intelligence with built-in compliance tools, Red Hat Enterprise Linux reduces manual effort, allowing IT teams to focus on high-value initiatives rather than routine maintenance.
Simplified management to increase operational efficiency
Red Hat Enterprise Linux addresses the modern IT landscapes by making Linux accessible for all skill levels. Packed with intelligent features like Red Hat Lightspeed and built-in automation, teams can optimize operations and save valuable resources.
Innovations like image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux introduce a container-native way to build and manage OS images, streamlining deployment and simplifying appliance creation.
Backed by a 10-year support lifecycle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux protects your investments and provides confidence for long-term planning.
Choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows organizations to shift focus from maintenance to innovation, keeping systems safe and ready for the future.
Boost innovation on a consistent foundation
To remain competitive, organizations must deliver new services and applications efficiently. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports this pace by certifying all capabilities—from migration tools to container features—against the latest enterprise-ready Linux standards. This allows teams to adopt new technologies without sacrificing stability.
Trusted support and expertise
Choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more than a software decision—it’s a trusted partnership backed by over 30 years of open source community leadership and Linux expertise.
A subscription grants immediate access to expert phone and online support, giving your organization peace of mind to focus on innovation. This commitment to guidance extends to the Red Hat Customer Portal, a centralized hub for security data, mitigation steps, technical documentation, and direct collaboration with Red Hat experts.
Discover how to maximize value across 7 key operational areas with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux benefits my company…by providing the foundation of Red Hat Linux, over 20 years and more. Coupled with the backing of a company such as IBM, you've got a company that can help solve pretty much any problem.
It's the flexibility, almost the one-stop-shop nature, that Red Hat provides, that really creates an administrative-friendly environment.
Chapter 3: Get started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you gain access to various tools, security features, and support resources to create the consistent, security-focused, and reliable OS your organization needs to operate modern IT practices.
This includes:
To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the powerful capabilities and benefits it can provide your organization, visit redhat.com/rhel.
Ready to get started?
Gerosa, Marco and Adrienn Lawson. “The State of Global Open Source 2025.” The Linux Foundation, accessed 11 Dec. 2025.
IDC White Paper. “Worldwide Server Operating System Environments Forecast, 2025–2029.” Document #US53461925, Aug. 2025.
IDC White Paper.“Linux Trends and Strategies 2025: Qualboard Summary.” Document #US52534125, March 2025.
Management Insight Technologies, sponsored by Red Hat. “Linux Market Study for Red Hat,” June 2025.
IDC White Paper. “Worldwide Server Operating System Environments Forecast, 2025– 2029.” Document #US53461925, Aug. 2025.
IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat. “The Business Value of Red Hat Solutions Versus Non-Paid Open Source Alternatives” Document #US50423523, March 2023.
Principled Technologies, “Save administrator time with the automated remediation capabilities of Red Hat Insights.” Oct. 2024.
IDC Executive Summary, sponsored by Red Hat. "The Business Value of Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux." Doc#US52594324, November 2025.
