Highlights –

  • Complaint with PCI-SS and HIPAA norms, the new platform offers new cryptographic frameworks with assistance for OpenSSL.
  • For enterprises, the RHEL9 inculcates several improvements, building on the key capabilities of RHEL8,

At its ongoing Crimson Hat Summit, Red Hat Inc, a provider of enterprise open-source solutions, made a sweeping set of announcements, including the launch of its new working system, Crimson Hat Enterprise Linux 9. The new version of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system has been designed to provide corporations stability, security, reliability, and agility. The new platform will allow enterprises to deliver a safer computing setting at scale, be it a hybrid cloud, public cloud, or edge community setting.

Complaint with PCI-SS and HIPAA norms, the new platform offers new cryptographic frameworks with assistance for OpenSSL. With this, customers can encrypt information throughout their environments.

For enterprises, the RHEL9 inculcates several improvements, building on the key capabilities of RHEL8. It also has added new safety and hybrid cloud capabilities to help developers secure their environments better in the wake of the next generation of threats.

RHEL9’s integrity measurement architecture warrants identity

One of the main challenges users face is that it’s difficult for them to trust the network infrastructure in use by then, and this is what RHEL9 aims to address.

“Trust is a huge concern for security posture in enterprise IT. Security teams, CISOs and CIOs, are frequently trying to understand what aspects of their technology landscape can be trusted, i.e., given access to sensitive systems and data and which should be treated as untrusted or unknown,” said Executive, VP, Products and Technologies at Red Hat, Matt Hicks.

RHEL9 uses Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) digital hashes and signatures to tackle the trust challenge head-on and allow the users to validate the integrity of the operating system and verify that it hasn’t been tampered with or compromised.

The IMA will also alert the security teams in case anyone attempts to deploy a malicious patch or misconfiguration.

“IMA works at the Linux kernel level, providing a way to verify that individual files are what they say they are and that they’re from a known and trusted source. This helps the IT organization better detect accidental or malicious modifications to the file and operating systems, making it far easier to catch a potential issue before it leads to downtime or a data breach,” Hicks said.

Enterprise operating systems at glance

The news has come at an opportune time when reports expect the global operating systems market to gradually increase from USD 43.14 billion in 2021 to USD 48.18 billion in 2026.

The new security capabilities introduced by Red Hat into its new OS will allow it to become a more competitive offering for enterprise customers functioning in hybrid cloud environments.

It will also make it stand out from other providers in the market, such as Oracle Linux, a free Linux operating system designed for open-cloud environments and offers automated patching capabilities. The organization also raised USD 10.5 billion in revenue recently.

Fedora, a free Linux distribution, is another competitor which has been designed for software developers with a range of open-source languages, as well as virtual machine management capabilities, identity management and Windows domain integration.

What differentiates Red Hat from other open-source Linux distributions is the new security features such as IMA that will help it offer its users more secure options for managing their computing workloads.