With the increasing number of cyber threats targeting enterprise infrastructures, I'm looking for best way to secure Enterprise Linux servers in a corporate environment.

We run multiple RHEL and CentOS servers handling critical business applications, and I want to ensure we're following industry-standard security measures. Some key concerns include:

• Hardening SSH access (beyond key-based authentication)

• Best firewall configurations for enterprise use

• SELinux policies for optimal security without breaking functionality

• Monitoring and logging tools for real-time threat detection

• Patch management strategies for minimizing downtime

Are there any specific tools, configurations, or automated solutions that have worked well in your environment?

Looking forward to expert recommendations!

Thanks in advance

Hey Valentine.  I suggest you start with the Center for Internet Security Critical Controls and benchmarks.  It is all free to download and there are benchmarks for RHEL and CentOS.  I have used them to good effect throughout my work.  You should also check out Fortra's Tripwire, which is a FIM tool that may be suitable for your environment (I am sure other vendors do similar)

CIS Controls: https://www.cisecurity.org/controls

CIS Benchmarks: https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks

Hope that helps.

Mike

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Michael Davison
EMEA Support Team Lead
Fortra
Peterborough
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I would suggest that you look at the PowerSC offering from IBM - which could help you apply the right controls as well as monitoring the real time security of a Linux LPAR. There is support for RHEL endpoints, and the PowerSC tools will cover a lot of the areas you've mentioned there. As well as monitoring the security status of a workload, you can apply compliance profiles to ensure that security rules are met on a system (or systems), and then check them regularly to ensure that nothing has changed.