Maximise your enterprise Linux with Red Hat

Standardising your enterprise Linux environment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

At Northdoor, we have noted a strong uptake in Enterprise Red Hat Linux (RHEL) deployments in recent years.  Many organisations that were primarily Unix or Windows in the past have been taking steps towards Linux for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to take advantage of the pace of innovation afforded by such a massive developer base or to support new and emerging workloads such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, many of which were born on Linux.  This shift in IT environment has afforded many organisations the opportunity to leverage new technologies for their clients but in many cases the rapid growth has resulted in a mixture of Linux distributions which are hard to manage.

To address this challenge, Northdoor can help you understand your current Linux estate and guide you towards a standardised environment that is simpler to support and secure.

When looking to standardise on a Linux distribution, Northdoor recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a variety of reasons, including:

1. Enterprise-grade support and stability

• Long-term Support (LTS) – Red Hat provides a minimum of 10 years of support for each major release, with regular security patches and updates. This stability is crucial for enterprises with large, critical infrastructures where major release updates can be disruptive.
• Certified Ecosystem – RHEL is widely adopted in enterprise environments and is supported by many hardware and software vendors, ensuring compatibility with third-party applications, tools and server hardware.
• Red Hat Support – With a subscription to RHEL, you get access to Red Hat’s official support, providing direct access to experts for troubleshooting, configuration advice and emergency assistance.

2. Security and compliance

• Security Enhancements – Red Hat have developed a security architecture called Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) which provides advanced security management to help mitigate potential security risks. Combining this with OpenSCAP allows clients to manage compliance against security standards such as CIS.
• Regular Updates and Patches – Red Hat actively releases security patches and updates, helping protect the system against vulnerabilities.

3. Cloud and hybrid cloud readiness

• Cloud Integration – RHEL is widely supported across public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud & Google Cloud) and private cloud environments, making it an excellent choice for hybrid cloud deployments.
• Red Hat OpenShift – OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes platform that provides a seamless foundation for deploying containerised applications either on-premises, at the edge or in the cloud.

4. Total cost of ownership

• Whilst RHEL comes with subscription fees, the long-term support, security and stability it offers can significantly reduce the costs associated with patch management, security breaches, and troubleshooting issues in production environments.
• Predictable budgets for ongoing costs and support contracts avoid unforeseen expenses associated with maintaining multiple different Linux distributions.

5. Enterprise-grade management tools

• Red Hat provides several powerful system management tools such as Satellite and Insights that helps manage RHEL systems across the enterprise, ensuring compliance, patching, identifying vulnerabilities and provisioning.
• Ansible – Red Hat Ansible is one of the most widely used automation tool with thousands of ready-made Ansible modules available for download to plug into the majority of hardware & software environments.

Why Northdoor?

In business for over 30 years and born out of the heavily regulated Financial Services industry, Northdoor are well versed in dealing with the most critical enterprise systems.  Bringing this pedigree and experience to bear on Linux environments, we help our clients build robust enterprise-level operational practices.  As well as helping clients towards a standardised, supportable Linux estate, we regularly help in the following areas:

• Utilising DevOps methodology for standardising RHEL configurations
• Hardening RHEL instances to CIS standards to improve security posture for our clients
• Automated patching using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Github actions and Ansible
• Remediating security vulnerabilities with Red Hat Insights, integrated with Ansible for automated remediation
• Building in-house local YUM repositories for clients preferring on-premises RPM package management with strict versioning
• Implementing immutability checks at intervals, ensuring RHEL instances conform to predefined standards set in Ansible code.  Any deviations can either trigger notifications or be fixed automatically by Ansible
• Using containers to standardise application deployment.

Where to Start

At the beginning of a new engagement, we would suggest starting with a discovery of your Linux estate.  Northdoor have developed a set of discovery scripts to automate this process, using an Ansible scan to retrieve details of each Linux server.  From here, we can help you map out the best course of action to standardise your Linux estate and modernise your IT operations.

For help understanding how to make the most of your Linux environment, get in touch to arrange a discovery exercise.