4 strategic benefits of standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Composed of a variety of operating systems and versions, server hardware configurations, and management tools, today’s IT environments are complex. It typically takes a large, skilled IT team to handle interoperability issues, complicated administration, and labor-intensive processes.

Too often, the result is slower provisioning, more downtime, and greater security and compliance gaps. It can be difficult to deliver the innovative solutions and services your business needs with the efficiency and speed it demands. And moving to the cloud introduces even more complexity. In fact, businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees already deploy 67% of their workloads in public cloud environments.¹

Accordingly, many IT teams are looking for ways to simplify their IT environments to better support business requirements.

A standardized operating environment (SOE), based on a consistent operating system and set of tools, can help you overcome IT complexity to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase uptime, speed deployment and provisioning, boost security, and boost IT productivity. As a result, your IT team can meet modern, dynamic business demands while maintaining security, availability, and flexibility.

Regardless of your organization size, standardizing on a commercial-grade, cloud-ready, and fully supported operating system like Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® offers a variety of benefits.

Benefit 1: Improve your security posture

Consistency is at the core of security and compliance best practices in any environment. To protect your business, you need the same level of security policy and access controls across all IT infrastructure. Standardizing on an operating system that provides consistent security controls across all footprints can help you improve security and compliance across your organization. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it simpler to maintain security and compliance across on-site, cloud, and edge environments. Built-in security features like live kernel patching, security profiles, security standards certification, and a trusted software supply chain to help you meet today’s high security and compliance expectations. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also includes Red Hat Insights, a unique suite of hosted services that helps you manage and optimize your IT environment. To simplify security operations, Red Hat Insights identifies, assesses, and recommends remediation for security and compliance risks across all of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Benefit 2: Boost IT agility and innovation

SOEs can bring a variety of IT infrastructure footprints together into a single environment. Standardizing on an operating system that runs consistently across physical, virtualized, cloud, and edge infrastructure lets you deploy your workloads and services wherever it makes the most sense. For example, you might choose to deploy some applications in a cloud environment to optimize costs and others in a private datacenter for performance or data privacy reasons. Or you might run a particular workload in your datacenter and then burst to the cloud for periods of high demand.

SOEs also support IT innovation. Because all systems in your environment use the same operating system, the applications and services that your IT and development teams create can be deployed anywhere in your environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a consistent experience across IT footprints, as well as versions for several processor architectures, so your teams can develop, deploy, and move your applications on the right infrastructure at all times.

Benefit 3: Gain flexibility and choice

Collaboration and partnership are critical for creating IT solutions that can support business needs for organizations of all sizes across industries and regions. Choosing an operating system vendor with a large partner ecosystem can give you more IT flexibility. Testing, validation, and certification ensure that partner products run reliably on your operating system. As a result, you can choose your preferred hardware, software, cloud, and service providers without worrying about interoperability issues.

Red Hat partners with industry-leading hardware, software, and cloud vendors to give you more choice, innovation, and stability. 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. Red Hat also works with many systems integrators and service providers that can help you build your environment.

Finally, Red Hat works with all major cloud providers, plus a large selection of regional providers, to ensure Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs well in their clouds. You can purchase and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces or use subscriptions bought from Red Hat in your cloud of choice. You can also take advantage of several committed spend and advance purchase programs for discounted pricing and flexible payment options.

Benefit 4: Increase operational efficiency

SOEs can greatly streamline IT operations. Rather than splitting operations 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. It’s also easier to automate tasks in a standardized environment—you can use the same automation across all of your systems. As a result, your teams can refocus on strategic, high-value tasks rather than learning and managing a wide selection of platforms and tools.

Included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to streamline operational tasks, prioritize issues, and provide remediation guidance, helping to close skills gaps in your team. With a focus on operations, security, and business outcomes, it proactively alerts administrators and stakeholders before an outage, security event, or overspending occurs. And Insights works across on-site and cloud environments, so your teams can manage everything from a single interface.

A collection of Ansible® automation content included in your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles let you automate many common administrative tasks. Using system roles, you can ensure repeatable configuration across multiple systems, streamline daily system administration, and execute system management tasks consistently across your IT infrastructure. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also integrates with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you scale rapidly, improve productivity, and manage costs. By automating Red Hat Enterprise Linux management tasks with Ansible Automation Platform, you can optimize your processes, reduce the risk of performance issues, and avoid configuration drift across your entire environment. You can also automate complex workflows—from provisioning and deployment, to Day 2 operations and management, to policy application and enforcement—at scale.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you the freedom and flexibility to innovate rapidly across hybrid environments, without leaving your existing workloads and applications behind. You can run the applications and workloads your business needs, where it makes the most sense, and move them when requirements or demand changes, all with the confidence that everything will work together reliably. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also provides a stable, consistent, and trusted platform for streamlining operations and building a strong security posture at any scale.

Experience the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in your organization.