Shadow Soft is deeply invested in helping customers maintain business continuity and stability regardless of external factors your organization might be facing. More than ever, you have to reassess how you approach your people, internal processes, and supporting technology to weather the challenges and difficulties you are facing amidst COVID-19. Among these challenges is an economy that is difficult and rapidly changing as this pandemic progresses.
Questions and concerns around budget and technology are often common discussions when we experience economic disruption. Often these discussions center around technology renewals, Red Hat often among them, and what to do. Shadow Soft is here to explain some key advantages around why renewing your Red Hat subscriptions is not only valuable, but a safe, secure way to ensure limited to no business disruption.
Business Continuity & “Change of Stream” Costs
A unique characteristic of our current COVID-19 work environment is a distributed or remote workforce. Many organizations have chosen to practice safety measures for their employees and customers by moving to entirely virtual meetings and working from home. This poses some distinct challenges for many organizations, from the customer-facing side to how teams and projects are collaborated on together. Shadow Soft believes in business stability and continuity, it’s what we do and how we focus our enablement of organizations around technology. ]
Renewing your existing Red Hat infrastructure maintains continuity of critical software and infrastructure that teams understand, are experienced working with, and prevents any additional and costly hurdles of business disruption from acquiring or switching to a new provider or software. By maintaining your current infrastructure, software, and subscription base, you can ensure your teams will be able to continue operating in their best, most productive capacity without confusion or disruption, even in a distributed environment.
Additionally, there are costs associated with changing vendors or software. Maintaining your current Red Hat subscription base ensures you won’t have to incur costs associated with switching to another enterprise-grade OS or development software, as well as the costs associated with compatibility matching and workaround in the form of man-hours and downtime internally and/or to customers. These “change of stream” costs can oftentimes become more costly and more disruptive than maintaining your current software profile.
Security & Compliance
Another advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it is consistently monitored, assessed and patched for vulnerabilities and threats posed to the Linux community. Red Hat takes security very seriously to ensure customers are protected against the most up-to-date security threats and vulnerabilities. Maintaining your current subscription base of RHEL provides a number of key advantages in this arena. Firstly it helps to keep your organization protected against threats in a time of already strained resources and economic turmoil. Security breaches due to vulnerabilities can not only be costly, but damage the trust and reputation customers have for an organization, leading to further incurred long-term costs. Those security threats become more prevalent and dangerous as teams become more distributed and adjust to this new working environment and normal, where gaps in oversight can occur. This is where Red Hat’s proven hardening, protection, and vigilance comes in handy and provides peace of mind as your organization weathers the storm through COVID-19.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2 certified, as well as being the first Linux container framework support to be Common Criteria-certified (v7.1). Included tools like Red Hat Insights in RHEL 8 can help ensure your RHEL systems are not only stable and in good configuration, but also ensure they maintain compliance and automate corrections as needed. Many Linux distributions require significant modification to bring them into true compliance which can be costly in terms of man-hours and potential downtime as well. Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps organizations achieve compliance and required safety standards with ease and the tools surrounding it to ensure you maintain it in a highly transparent, informative, and easy fashion.
Support
One of the bigger hurdles organizations are seeing is that as teams adjust to working in a distributed, remote working environment, collaboration and technical support is taking some time to get adjusted and back to full functionality. During this adjustment period, blind spots can occur and as we all know, software and processes can break leading to outages. When facing a difficult outage or technical issue, one place an organization doesn’t want to find themselves is without support. When you purchase a RHEL subscription, you’re getting more than world-leading, enterprise-grade software, you’re also getting the full force of Red Hat’s technical resources and support. Should something go wrong, Red Hat has your back to ensure technical and functional issues get resolved in a quick and effective manner. Red Hat support also is helpful for configuration, best architecture and right-sizing, and general product inquiry advice. Supportable software is also a part of many organizational and industrial compliance policies, something that needs to be kept pace of and in mind, especially during uncertain times.
Deep Partner Network & Vendor Consolidation
Red Hat relies on their deep, rich network of partners to help them enable customers with enterprise-leading software, infrastructure, and best practices. Another advantage of your Red Hat subscription, especially when purchased or renewed through a Red Hat partner like Shadow-Soft, is that you gain access to trusted, capable resources and technical advisory to ensure your software doesn’t become “shelfware” while also giving you access, in many cases, to valuable consulting around Red Hat technologies and how best to employ them within your organization. In Shadow-Soft’s case, we focus on providing technologies to customers that makes sense, is effective, and ensuring the customer has the capabilities to maximize their investment.
One headache that also is often formed in this environment is the number of vendors providing mission-critical technologies to your organization. Maintaining your Red Hat subscriptions help avoid this particular issue of vendor confusion when you need support or guidance. By consolidating your vendors as much as possible, you avoid the time consuming and confusing practice of having to contact multiple vendors for support or advice around technologies which saves not only money and time, but you can be certain that the vendor you are contacting knows how all their technologies integrate together and are comprehensively supported.
Final Thoughts
One can see that in uncertain and unstable times, often the most effective and economical decision is to maintain stability and continuity. By continuing to leverage your existing technologies, you can maintain and progress business processes, ensure customer satisfaction and access, and provide peace of mind and security to your organization. Renewing your Red Hat subscriptions is one way to provide that continuity and peace of mind. Red Hat and Shad0w-Soft have your back to help you weather the storm and ensure you maximize your investments.
Need help navigating your Red Hat renewals? Contact us to learn how we can help you today.