Improve security and compliance

Linux is the foundation for the future
Linux® is one of the world’s most dominant operating systems, with widespread adoption across industries and emerging technologies.  It is commonly used for highly available, reliable, and critical workloads in datacenters and cloud computing environments and supports a variety of use cases, target systems, and devices. Every major public cloud provider offers multiple distributions of Linux in their marketplaces.

Even so, the Linux distribution and management tools you choose can greatly impact the efficiency, security, and interoperability of your IT environment. This e-book reviews key considerations and guidance around security vulnerability and compliance risk for Linux environments.

Adopt an effective security and compliance risk management approach
Security vulnerability and compliance management involves monitoring and assessing systems to ensure they comply with security and regulatory policies. An ideal security vulnerability and compliance management approach will let you develop consistent, repeatable processes across your entire environment to:

• Assess
  Identify systems that are noncompliant or vulnerable. Easily assess the actual security state of your environment from infrastructure to workload. Understand which of the multitude of security advisories are really applicable to your systems and environment.
• Prioritize
  Organize remediation actions by effort, impact, and issue severity. Apply risk management techniques to determine the actual business risk of each issue and plan remediation efforts accordingly. Risk encompasses the likelihood of an issue resulting in a breach, the potential severity of a breach, and the implications of fixing the issue. It may not make sense to fix a certain issue on development and test systems, but that same issue may be a high priority for production systems. 
• Remediate
  Quickly and easily patch and reconfigure all systems that require action. Automate configuration and patching processes to speed remediation, ensure consistency across systems, and reduce the risk of human error. Applied effectively, automated tools can help you get to a state where you can remediate issues rapidly, improving the security of your environment and business. 
• Report
  Validate that changes were applied and automate remediation reporting to streamline auditing efforts. Effective reporting helps you deliver information at the right level of detail for C-suite roles, auditors, and technical teams to understand current security risks and exposures.

This approach also helps to prepare your organization for modern, fast-moving development and management techniques like DevSecOps. In fact, 38% of organizations consider vulnerability assessment to be the most critical security element in their DevOps workflow.

Continue reading to know more about the key considerations and actions to more effectively manage your security and compliance risk with Red Hat at here.