Turning interesting times into normalcy: The constant value of a Red Hat subscription

For more than 20 years, Red Hat has worked to improve the IT experience. We do this through our technology, which adds hardening against wave after wave of software vulnerabilities and potential zero-day exploits, while also helping to make open source innovation more stable. The primary way we actually make IT better, however, is via a Red Hat subscription. 

A Red Hat subscription is much more than just a way to buy software. It's how we provide open, innovative technology to IT teams, and how we help our customers support, maintain, manage and better secure their environments. A subscription also provides our customers with a clear way of holding Red Hat accountable to their business goals because we need to earn their business every single year, unlike traditional licenses.

Innovation fuels business goals and helps drive transformation, but how do you know that the underlying code is hardened and free of known vulnerabilities? Where do you turn if you need help figuring out a new bug? What if you want to add other software to your stack?

Enter the Red Hat subscription, which expands the value of open, innovative software in a variety of ways:

• Support is the most obvious benefit of a subscription, which helps customers tap into the decades-plus expertise of Red Hat in open source technologies, from Linux platforms to the latest cloud-native advancements. From access to Red Hat’s vast knowledgebase of documentation to 24x7x365 access to experienced support engineers, customers are able to select the support model that best suits their unique business needs.

• Security resources are paramount to successful IT projects, especially as vulnerabilities grow more prevalent and threat actors more insidious. Red Hat’s software security starts with code hardening and shipping our software with security profiles and tools for many configurations, but this work extends beyond the initial sale, with the Red Hat Product Security team analyzing potential threats and vulnerabilities daily against our product footprints. This team then publishes documentation, mitigation and patches against these possible issues, helping environments stay operational with an improved security posture.

• An ecosystem of supported and certified partner technologies to help fully round out enterprise IT strategies. The Red Hat ecosystem encompasses thousands of products and cloud services that are tested and validated to perform with our solutions, extending outside of the datacenter, across multiple public clouds to the network’s edge. With Red Hat Cloud Access, our customers get even greater flexibility out of a subscription, as they can run eligible Red Hat products on certified public cloud providers — this helps drive greater portability between traditional datacenters and cloud environments.

We also continue to evolve our subscription services to include more than just the software, ecosystem and support service. Most recently we included Red Hat Insights as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions, a proactive IT risk analytics tool built on Red Hat’s expertise in open source technologies. With Insights, customers can more readily identify, prioritize and mitigate availability and performance risks in their environments before they become production-impacting issues.

Insights helps enhance how customers address software security requirements with malware and vulnerability scanning. Not only is this a useful new feature for IT teams seeking new ways to keep pace with a dynamic threat landscape, but it also shows how Red Hat continues to improve the IT experience through existing subscriptions. As Insights evolves, subscription customers simply get access to it — that’s it. There’s no waiting for the next release of RHEL; the value is added in real time as we make it ready for production environments.

All of this adds to the supported and consistent product lifecycles that our customers receive — there’s no sudden drop in support for a platform, as users know exactly where their deployed technologies stand at all times. This also includes knowledge of Red Hat’s future roadmaps, whether it’s Q&A sessions with our experts or being able to provide input on critical future platform innovations, our customers are able to see new features develop and plan their strategies accordingly.

If you want to learn more about how Red Hat subscriptions help you to put technology to work in complex environments, please read The value of a Red Hat subscription.