4 considerations for standardizing on a Linux platform

Choosing the right Linux® platform is critical for organizations to manage increasingly complex IT challenges and stay competitive. Here are four considerations that can help determine which Linux operating system can best support innovation, streamline operations, and help your organization succeed in the long term.

Gain the freedom and flexibility to innovate more efficiently across your hybrid cloud environment. 

Streamline operations so teams can spend less time on maintenance and more time working on projects that deliver real business value and empower innovation with:

• A platform built for hybrid cloud development and for the operations teams that use it. 
• The freedom to build, deploy, and scale applications and workloads without requiring new training.
• Tools to manage existing applications and the latest technology to help support faster innovation and increased agility. 
• Built-in automation capabilities that help simplify how operations teams deploy, scale, and manage applications in production. 

Look for a Linux solution that offers organizations the confidence to build on a stable and consistent foundation with security features built-in. 

To minimize security flaws and more effectively manage challenges that could pose a risk, choose a platform that has security features and security profiles to help reduce risk and maintain compliance. Consider features such as:

• Government and regulated industry standards, such as Common Criteria and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) validations and certifications. 
• Development practices that minimize security flaws across the entire code base before shipping. 
• Stable applications written specifically for your Linux distribution, which will help to reduce application migration issues across life cycles. 
• The ability to stay ahead of threats with integrated and automated controls that monitor the security of IT infrastructure to help your teams more efficiently detect and manage threats, compliance, performance, availability, and stability weaknesses. 

Complex infrastructure can cause many challenges for organizations—from decreased efficiency to increased management costs. 

With a consistent and repeatable Linux platform for all deployments, whether on-premise, virtualized, in cloud environments, or at the network edge, organizations can streamline infrastructure, as well as:

• Increase operational efficiency by standardizing, allowing teams to do more, faster. 
• Accelerate speed of innovation and boost business agility with the freedom to select the solutions they need from a vast catalog of supported hardware, software, and cloud partners. 
• More easily configure, deploy, and manage at scale, helping keep costs low and maintain efficiency as their infrastructure grows. 
• Reduce time spent on complex operational tasks with predictive analytics to proactively detect issues, analyze configurations, and prescribe remediations.  

Think beyond what challenges you can solve today and take advantage of tools and support that can help you prepare for long-term success. 

A reliable foundation sets organizations up for lasting success by providing: 

• Stability and longevity for operations which can maintain critical applications for 10 years or more.
• Access to published predictable release cycles, end-of-maintenance dates, upgrade options, and compatibility information to help plan IT maintenance and application refreshes appropriately.
• Migration and automation tools that simplify the task of updating to the latest version or migration from other Linux distributions.
• A global support network of experienced technical support engineers, 24x7.
• An extensive software and hardware partner ecosystem.

Operate with confidence and trust knowing that the platform you choose empowers innovation and accelerates the adoption of industry best practices—no matter where you choose to run. Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® offers all of the capabilities to support these 4 considerations across all deployment footprints.

Sign up for a free trial of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or experiment using our interactive labs. Labs provide pre-configured Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances to help you explore how Red Hat can help you solve real-world problems that organizations face.

Read the e-book Why the operating system matters to find out what cloud adoption looks like and what happens when cloud projects fail.