Treating software infrastructure like bottled water

Earlier this month, more than 400,000 people in Toledo, Ohio were told to not consume, cook with, or boil the tap water, after a toxin called microcystin was found in the water supply. While you take water for granted, would you drink it from a source that isn’t trusted? What if it came through pipes that don’t adhere to industry standards, or from faucets that are not manufactured in factories that are ISO 9000 certified?

 

Clearly, no. Nor should you contaminate your IT infrastructure with components of a computing stack that do not maintain a high level of quality, commitment to standards, a chain of trust, and proper certifications. To do so would introduce many business and technology risks.

 

 

Red Hat’s focus is to create secure, enterprise software solutions that work together to help customers and partners prepare their infrastructure to embrace the future of technology. Red Hat has worked with hardware and software vendors for more than 12 years to develop a broad ecosystem of high quality, standard-based solutions built around secure, enterprise-grade Linux. We then made it easier to consume virtualization by building Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on top of that same operating system. As our portfolio has evolved, we have continued this approach of using the same OS foundation to help extend your infrastructure with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), software-defined storage, and even OpenStack solutions. As you embrace application containerization, the optimized container host we announced at Red Hat Summit in April is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the application container itself will also leverage that same trusted technology pool.

 

What does building upon the same foundation give you? With Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the foundation, you benefit from a consistent experience of security, quality, and ability to certify across the stack. And Red Hat products are designed and tested for use as both an integrated stack and independently to provide you with a complete solution that offers leading performance, reduced complexity, comprehensive functionality, and extensive flexibility.

 

It’s no surprise that water we consume is constantly audited for compliance with national and international standards. As the operating system becomes as pervasive as water, shouldn’t the quality, chain of trust, and certifications that drive the operating system’s ubiquity become more important than ever?