Ensuring 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 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:

• How enterprise Linux supports business continuity
• Reducing Linux downtime
• Linux resilience at scale

The backbone of business continuity: enterprise Linux infrastructure

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’s role in business continuity 

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.

Enterprise-grade Linux: built for business-critical workloads

Part of Linux’s strength is in its robust open source community. Enterprise Linux benefits from these open source roots, offering key advantages that non-paid distributions simply can’t match.

A predictable operating system lifecycle is essential for maintaining business continuity. Enterprise-grade Linux provides the stability of well-defined release schedules, extended support timelines, and reliable security patches—giving organizations the confidence to plan for the future.”

For business-critical systems, expert support is essential. Enterprise Linux provides enterprise-grade service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee timely, priority assistance, unlike upstream distributions, which often rely on community support. 

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, as we saw in July 2024, when a routine application update led to widespread disruptions; see “Massive Outage Highlights Need for Resilient Operating System.”

Mitigating downtime with SUSE

Downtime can have catastrophic effects on businesses, resulting in lost revenue, productivity and even long-term customer trust. The key to mitigating this risk is having a resilient IT infrastructure designed to minimize disruptions and keep systems online.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and the SUSE multi-Linux management solution, SUSE Manager, are built to address these challenges: 

• SLES offers long-term enterprise-grade stability and support, ensuring high availability and reliability for critical business workloads from the edge to the cloud. 
• SUSE Manager offers a single interface to manage, patch and update all Linux distributions across your environment. This unifies the process of managing mixed IT estates and ensures that all systems are up-to-date and secure.

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 a 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.”*

Elevate your Linux systems’ performance with SUSE

SUSE’s commitment to open source technologies not only fosters flexibility but also allows enterprises to future-proof their IT strategies. By leveraging open innovation and collaboration, SUSE ensures that businesses are prepared for emerging challenges and can adapt to future needs.

By choosing SUSE Linux, you empower your teams with the confidence that comes from a resilient IT foundation. Learn more about how SUSE can ensure your business continuity in IDC’s white paper: 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