How to Ensure Business Continuity with SUSE Linux

The top of IT teams’ minds is the challenge of avoiding unplanned downtime. Even brief interruptions can severely impact productivity, customer satisfaction and revenue. The challenge lies in building a resilient IT infrastructure that supports business continuity and promotes efficiency, while adapting to evolving demands and complexities. 

Enterprise-grade Linux solutions play a pivotal role in safeguarding operations and minimizing disruptions, making them an essential component of any robust IT strategy.

In this article, learn more about:

• The business value of enterprise Linux
• Reducing downtime and fueling innovation
• Linux resilience at scale
• Choosing an enterprise-grade distribution

Linux’s role in optimizing operational efficiency

To stay competitive, enterprises require reliable, secure and scalable systems that can not only support day-to-day operations but also foster innovation and growth. Downtime is not an option, and IT infrastructure must be designed to handle surges in demand and adapt to new challenges.

Linux has long been the backbone of IT environments due to its flexibility and performance. When it comes to ensuring business continuity, enterprise-grade Linux goes beyond the capabilities of free upstream distributions. With added features, heightened security and long-term product roadmaps, enterprise Linux like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) ensures that IT teams have the tools and support they need to minimize disruptions.

If technology sprawl has created an unsustainable level of complexity for your enterprise, IDC’s research into SUSE’s business value is worth a read. And if you still look at operating systems as a simple utility, allow us to introduce you to the strategic opportunities of enterprise-grade Linux.

Enterprise-grade Linux: built for business-critical workloads

Can an open source operating system live up to the challenges of enterprise workloads? Yes and, in fact, part of Linux’s strength is its robust open source community. Enterprise Linux benefits from these roots, offering key advantages that non-paid distributions simply can’t match. For example:

• A predictable operating system lifecycle is essential for business continuity. Enterprise-grade Linux provides well-defined release schedules, extended support timelines, and reliable security patches.
• For business-critical systems, expert support is essential. Enterprise Linux comes with service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee timely, priority assistance,. 
• Beyond SLAs, enterprise Linux delivers innovation tailored for business-critical workloads, ensuring resilience, security and compliance. 

Without a resilient OS, businesses run the risk of massive outages. We have unfortunately seen numerous examples in recent years, including in July 2024, when a routine application update led to widespread disruptions.

Mitigating downtime with SUSE

Downtime can have catastrophic effects on businesses, resulting in lost revenue, productivity and even long-term customer trust. Your team undoubtedly understands these risks, but fragmented tools and a growing list of manual updates can make downtime feel inevitable.

The key to mitigating such liabilities is having a resilient, streamlined IT infrastructure that is designed to minimize disruptions and keep systems online. Solutions like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and the SUSE Multi-Linux Manager are built to achieve these goals: 

• SLES offers long-term enterprise-grade stability and support, ensuring high availability and reliability for critical business workloads from the edge to the cloud. Our latest distribution, SLES 16.0, is specifically designed to meet today’s IT challenges. It also helps you keep things optimized as you navigate upcoming evolutions in your business.  
• SUSE Multi-Linux Manager offers a unified control plane for managing, patching and updating all Linux distributions across your environment. Built-in automation further streamlines the process of managing mixed IT estates and ensures that all systems are up-to-date and secure.
• In addition, SUSE Multi-Linux Support can augment your capacity to mitigate the challenges of managing heterogeneous environments. You’ll retain the freedom to choose the best Linux distributions for your business while receiving continuous, resiliency-building support.

In a recent white paper titled “The Business Value of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager,” IT market research firm IDC found that SUSE Linux helped enterprises reduce unplanned downtime by 57%.* IDC calculated that this reduction in unplanned outages helped organizations avoid $75,237 on average in annual revenue loss.*

IDC’s research underscores just how much impact resilient Linux systems can have on business continuity and uninterrupted operations. Download the white paper to learn more.

Scaling and innovating with confidence: a future-proofed IT strategy

As businesses grow, their IT needs expand across cloud environments, edge deployments and remote systems. Enterprises need operating systems that can scale alongside their growth and provide an interoperable IT foundation for strategic initiatives. Without scalable solutions, managing such an environment becomes increasingly difficult, and the risk of unplanned outages rises.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides the resilience and high availability Linux needed for distributed environments with automated health checks, rollback capabilities and features designed for large-scale operations. These tools reduce time-to-recovery and improve uptime across all systems. IDC found that customers with SUSE improved their mean time to recovery (MTTR) by 36% when outages did occur.*

When SUSE keeps systems resilient and secure, regardless of scale, this empowers enterprises to focus on strategic initiatives, not maintenance. One financial services organization told IDC: “SUSE has enabled my organization to be more responsive to business needs. We can deploy anywhere that we want, as quickly as we want. This is a big improvement over our past solution.”*

How do I choose the right Linux distribution?

When comparing different enterprise-grade Linux distributions, you will need to keep your own organizationally-specific criteria in mind. However, the following checklist includes features that provide critical value to almost every modern enterprise. When considering Linux distribution options, look for:

• The ability to patch, secure and manage your entire estate from one place
• Rapid response to new security vulnerabilities
• Reliable patches and updates that won’t break your applications
• Strong security configurations, such as robust access controls and disabling unused services by default
• Active verification of software packages and repositories
• Workload-specific tools that help you monitor system health and optimize performance
• Actionable security documentation and hardening guides for your team
• Extended lifecycles and support, ideally for 10+ years

In highly regulated industries, you’ll also want to prioritize Linux distributions that have earned the security certifications required by governments and other critical institutions. 

Fortunately, certified distributions like SLES can reliably support critical databases, ERPs like SAP, and more. Just ask Fora, which helps hundreds of thousands of companies and their employees navigate pension and insurance solutions.

Reduce complexity and elevate performance with SUSE

SUSE’s commitment to open source technologies not only fosters flexibility but also allows enterprises to strategically manage costs, upcoming EOL concerns and, overall, future-proof their IT strategies. By leveraging open innovation and collaboration, SUSE ensures that businesses are prepared for emerging evolutions in business—from AI transformation to digital sovereignty and beyond.

By choosing SUSE Linux, you empower your teams through unified automation and efficient, reliable operations. Learn more about the confidence that comes from a resilient IT and, specifically, how SUSE can ensure your business continuity: The Business Value of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager.

* IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by SUSE, The Business Value of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager, August 2024 | IDC #US52392824

Enterprise-grade Linux FAQs

What are the risks of using free Linux servers?

Free hosting typically poses major security and performance risks. They are more vulnerable to malicious code, backdoors and other vulnerabilities. You are less likely to have access to sufficient compute, memory and storage. And they rarely provide any troubleshooting support.

Is Linux more resilient than Windows?

While no operating system can guarantee a fully error-free experience, Linux provides a proven, resilient and secure foundation for critical operations. Because Linux is an open source OS, its source code is transparent, and the open source community will help you catch and mitigate risks.

What security certifications apply to Linux?

There are several certifications that can help prove your distribution’s compliance with strict security rules. For example:

• Common Criteria (CC) – Internationally recognized security certification for IT products, including Linux distributions.
• FIPS 140-3 – Federal standard for cryptographic security in Linux systems.
• CIS Benchmarks – Best-practice guidelines for secure Linux configurations.
• SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS – Compliance standards that ensure Linux security in cloud and enterprise environments.