Bringing Management-as-a-Service to the enterprise

Today Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 which was designed for the hybrid cloud era -- supporting workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is a leap forward in providing enterprises with a consistent platform as the foundation of their infrastructure. And the world’s leading enterprise Linux needs management solutions designed to keep up with today’s hybrid IT. Solutions that can manage with ease environments across on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds.

According to an IDC study, “lack of a unified control layer (or control plane) is the top challenge with using multiple cloud IaaS providers. This exposes the need for unified control and management, a central requirement for multi-location management.”¹ Managing systems dispersed across a variety of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure can present a significant challenge to IT organizations. Organizations grapple with the increased complexity that stems from using unintegrated tools and processes and staying proactive with challenges around system management, security, and compliance. Making sure management solutions work across these environments is critical in today’s IT.

Traditional solutions have yet to adapt to the needs of rapidly changing hybrid cloud environments. Over this past year, we have been refining our management solutions in coordination with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to enhance the performance, stability and security features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux - helping to make it more secure and the best managed Linux available.

Introducing Red Hat Smart Management

Red Hat Smart Management is an additional set of capabilities available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Insights. Red Hat Insights is now built-in with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for automated, proactive guidance and Red Hat Smart Management extends those capabilities even further to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments to be more optimally managed wherever they are deployed. Red Hat Smart Management combines Red Hat Satellite for on-premises systems management and new cloud management services for distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. It provides rich capabilities to manage, patch, configure and provision Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments across the hybrid cloud. The new technologies combined with the proven infrastructure management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite help IT teams gain the benefits of hybrid cloud computing while minimizing the scale of managing complex environments.

Over the past several years, we’ve watched our customers react to the shifting IT environment and paid close attention to what they needed to better manage their disparate infrastructure. One takeaway was to make it easier to use our management solutions in cloud-native environments and to provide innovations faster. Starting with Red Hat Smart Management, we are expanding to include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery for many of our management tools to reduce the complexity and human error typical in on-premises implementations. Red Hat’s new SaaS management offerings are designed to decrease the time to deliver innovation to our customers, allowing us to provide continuous improvements and enhancements.

At launch, Red Hat Smart Management includes three new cloud services that help users take a proactive stance towards managing systems and environments. The new services include:

• Vulnerability management, enabling customers to more easily assess, monitor, report, and remediate common vulnerability and exposures (CVEs) in their Red Hat environment so that they can better secure their data and business from malicious actions and threats. Vulnerability management covers all known CVEs with errata - which is currently approaching 20,000.

• Compliance management, enabling customers to assess, monitor, report, and remediate internal and external regulatory and compliance requirements of their Red Hat environment with ease to be compliant and more secure.

• System comparison allows for the comparison of system facts across hosts and helps enable sorting based on differences and similarities for simplified troubleshooting.

Management for the hybrid cloud era

We want to be able to provide our customers with management solutions that match the flexibility and ease-of-use of their environments. Over the coming months, we plan to add additional cloud services to our management portfolio that make it easier to optimize and manage Red Hat environments across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

As organizations balance the need to go to market faster and use new technologies to do so, they are prone to unanticipated complexity and risks in their environment. Starting with Red Hat Smart Management, we are creating a new era of management solutions designed to give IT teams more control and oversight over their infrastructure and help make cloud-native, hybrid and multicloud environments even more secure, manageable and compliant.

Red Hat Smart Management is available now and can be added to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription through cloud.redhat.com.