Regulatory compliance in various fields stipulates that you have defined responsibilities and support accountability. The net value here is that a vendor like

Regulatory compliance in various fields stipulates that you have defined responsibilities and support accountability. The net value here is that a vendor like Red Hat is already deployed at companies who comply to the same regulations, so we can all share and leverage best practice documents to satisfy those controls. Even if you had a team of 10 smart Linux engineers, you save time and money by leveraging Red Hat. In addition, you may also need patent indemnification and reliable security updates (we leaned on Red Hat heavily during ShellShock and others). For example, before I release a Linux image I have a checklist of 450+ items, including things like NIST certification. Red Hat streamlines this process as it has already been certified across the most strenuous of regulatory and compliance environments, and we can reuse much of that work. This isn't important for a clothing website startup for example, but for aircraft, CT scanners, anything ISO compliant, finance it is paramount to what is being delivered.