Simplify security operations with Red Hat Lightspeed

Managing IT security and compliance is a critical, never-ending organizational concern. Security operations (SecOps) teams face a moving target: keeping pace with shifting government mandates while manually auditing hundreds of system configurations. When compliance checks fall behind, security teams are left reacting to breaches instead of preventing them. In fact, "more than half of organizations reported financial losses from these breaches, while 44% reported operational disruptions and 26% suffered reputational damage." ¹ 

Red Hat® Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights) automates vulnerability detection and unifies compliance tracking across hybrid environments, helping organizations resolve security risks before they interrupt business. It combines predictive analytics trained on decades of Linux® and Kubernetes operational data to automate daily maintenance tasks across hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat Lightspeed gives organizations a single interface across on-premise and cloud environments so SecOps teams receive threat intelligence based on actual conditions and inform security practitioners with platform-specific details. SecOps teams can also respond to risks and incidents faster and in a more targeted manner. 

Red Hat Lightspeed is included at no extra cost with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift®, and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform. 

Boost SecOps efficiency and protection in 3 main areas with Red Hat Lightspeed. 

1. Detect and remediate security vulnerabilities at scale

The average time to identify and contain a data breach in 2025 was 276 days.¹ Data breaches with a lifecycle of fewer than 200 days saw a drop in average costs, to US$3.87 from US$4.07 in 2024, a nearly 5% decline.³ Consistent, daily system scanning can help organizations find vulnerabilities before they interrupt business operations or result in a breach.

Red Hat Lightspeed simplifies SecOps with security exposure detection, assessment, and remediation recommendations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. SecOps teams can quickly surface vulnerabilities that pose immediate risk, ranking them by severity and potential operational impact so they know exactly where to patch first. For the most visible (sometimes called celebrity) common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), Red Hat Lightspeed provides threat intelligence that allows teams to focus on patching the most critical systems, alerting teams to the systems that have vulnerable code but not an active exploit path. This notification becomes critical when an organization has a large environment and time is of the essence. Red Hat Lightspeed can also provide automated remediation actions for many other situations. By using Red Hat Lightspeed, SecOps teams can tackle detected problems faster, minimizing manual work and cutting operational costs.

Red Hat Lightspeed goes beyond typical scanners to deliver deep threat intelligence and recommendations based on platform-specific details. Using experience-based algorithms, developed by Red Hat security experts, Red Hat Lightspeed provides an accurate view of system settings and threat conditions without generating frustrating and time-consuming false positives. The system management tool also identifies whether the specific conditions are present for a known exploit or high-profile vulnerability, helping SecOps teams better understand the level of risk involved for each system and plan remediation actions in less time.

2. Simplify regulatory compliance across hybrid clouds

Continuous audit readiness turns regulatory compliance from a chaotic annual sprint into a predictable daily background process. Routinely monitoring and assessing system configurations can help organizations remain compliant and reduce business risk.

To maintain compliance with policies and requirements over time, Red Hat Lightspeed helps organizations maintain tracking and guidance at scale. Regulated activities can include auditing compliance with OpenSCAP, remediating systems that are noncompliant, and generating reports for security audits. Red Hat Lightspeed also includes built-in policies for many industry standards, including:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
• Enhanced Operating System Protection Profile (EOSPP), which is a part of Common Criteria.
• Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark.
•  Defense Information Systems Agency Secure Technical Implementation Guidelines (DISA STIG). Security teams can also customize default policies for existing systems and choose which policies apply to the appropriate systems for more accurate results.

Teams can use Red Hat Lightspeed to build, manage, and deploy policy-compliant operating system images in hybrid clouds. The tool focuses on helping teams build operating system images faster and with fewer manual steps. Red Hat Lightspeed can even create customized images, save them as templates, and push them to multiple cloud provider inventories to simplify provisioning.

3. Identify and mitigate malware threats automatically

Malware attacks can take many forms and result in a variety of exploits, from unauthorized access to data breaches to ransom demands. While defending IT systems from an attack is the best approach, quickly detecting malware once it has been installed can help mitigate the business effects.

Using Red Hat Lightspeed can help organizations find and respond to malware threats, preventing long-term exposure. Monitor and assess existing systems to identify which ones contain active malware signatures. Access valuable, detailed threat information to prepare a response. Red Hat Lightspeed incorporates YARA pattern-matching software and IBM X-Force threat intelligence signatures to know when a system is susceptible to a malware attack. Defensive coverage is now significantly broader for current CrowdStrike users, with expert-verified YARA rules from CrowdStrike available in the malware service.⁴

Beyond threat detection, unified hybrid management gives SecOps teams and system administrators (SysAdmins) a single lens across infrastructure. Red Hat Lightspeed connects on-premise and cloud environments through a single console to deliver core services.

The Red Hat Lightspeed console includes:

Advisory service. Flags misconfigurations and provides playbooks to fix stability and performance issues before they cause downtime.

Vulnerability service. Identifies, prioritizes, and reports on known security CVEs. Includes CVE-specific reporting and remediation capabilities.

Compliance service. Monitors compliance with security baselines to report on and meet regulatory requirements at scale. Includes compliance policy tailoring, reporting, and remediation capabilities.

Planning service. Offers user-friendly options to plan ahead, giving security teams information on the release lifecycle and the tentative roadmap.

Malware-detection service. Scans for known malware using curated signature databases from IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence or lets current CrowdStrike customers import custom malware signatures.

Content-management service. Manages repositories, packages, and advisories across environments, providing content templates and playbooks to simplify patch deployment and Red Hat errata tracking.

Image-builder service. Simplifies image customization via the creation of blueprints and deployment across hybrid clouds. Allows the use of custom compliance policies created in Red Hat Lightspeed as a part of system images for greater consistency.

Cost-management service. Provides visibility into use and cost trends across hybrid clouds for Red Hat OpenShift. Allows teams to create cost models to charge back to customers or internal teams.

Subscription service. Delivers visibility into Red Hat subscription status, use trends, and utilization across an existing infrastructure.

Integrations and notifications service. Delivers Red Hat Lightspeed events into tools already in a daily workflow, including ServiceNow, Splunk, Microsoft Teams, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks, and email applications.

Deploying Red Hat Lightspeed is flexible and can be done in a number of ways. Choose the combination that works best for the existing architecture.

Managed: Red Hat Lightspeed is among the capabilities offered on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Red Hat manages the infrastructure of these Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Organizations need only connect and start reviewing the findings. The default method is a direct connection using port 443 to console.redhat.com.

Proxy: Most connect by proxy. For Red Hat Satellite users, Red Hat Satellite Server acts as the default proxy. Additional configuration is not required. For non-Satellite users, Red Hat supports a standard web proxy. For more information, review this knowledgebase article.

Self-managed: As a subset of Red Hat Lightspeed, capabilities are available on-premise. These capabilities are intended for use in environments where there is no connection to the internet.

• Self-managed capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are delivered by Red Hat Lightspeed in Satellite. They are currently limited to the advisor and vulnerability services, with additional features expected soon.
• Self-managed management for Red Hat OpenShift is handled by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, a platform that governs multicluster environments and supports advisor and cost-management services.

Whether operating connected clouds or air-gapped datacenters, organizations can take advantage of Red Hat Lightspeed to help maintain control over security and compliance. 

Ready to strengthen your enterprise hybrid cloud security posture? 

• Explore Red Hat Lightspeed at no additional cost or contact your Red Hat account team to schedule a demonstration. (Certain capabilities may require a subscription.)