About OEDIV

• Oetker Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung KG (OEDIV) is a German IT service provider and a subsidiary of the Oetker Group, one of Germany's largest businesses
• OEDIV provides managed services and infrastructure for businesses of all sizes, from global supermarket chains to healthcare organizations
• The company operates its own high-availability sovereign data centers in Europe, ensuring strict compliance with European and German data protection laws
• OEDIV has over 400 employees, more than 400 customers, and manages a fleet of 4,500 Linux systems

Introduction

OEDIV provides managed services and infrastructure to clients across a diverse range of industries. While each client’s individual needs may differ, the increased importance of security and compliance is paramount for every OEDIV customer, but with these requirements came a growing complexity gap. OEDIV managed multiple Linux distributions, and faced operational fragmentation that confined OEDIV to managing core operations, with little scope to take on custom requests and expand their service offering.

This complexity and fragmentation surfaced in several critical areas. For example, the version gap for components between different Linux distros required manual compilation and maintenance in order to satisfy modern application demands. Consequently, upgrading between distro versions was a slow, manual, and error-prone process that needed extensive checks and testing. Collectively, these factors made the essential task of CVE patching unnecessarily difficult, which presented a security risk.

Seeking to break out of the constraints of limited software availability and operational complexity, OEDIV decided to standardize a large part of their infrastructure on Ubuntu, backed by the extensive support offering of Ubuntu Pro.

Challenge

Before standardizing on Ubuntu, OEDIV faced friction and a difficult “version gap” in maintaining a modern and automated environment for their workloads. OEDIV found that other Linux distributions often featured components that lagged years behind the standard, forcing the OEDIV team to shoulder the burden of manually compiling and managing custom RPM packages for essential components like databases and web servers.

It wasn’t just business-as-usual activity that was intensive; system upgrades were complicated too. In order to move from legacy versions, the OEDIV team would be required to cycle through every interim version, rather than directly to major supported releases. Moving through multiple service packs on other distros proved slow and buggy, and demanded intense manual effort. When serving critical infrastructure customers who require exceptionally fast reactions to vulnerabilities, such as hospitals and gas stations, this resulted in unacceptably long maintenance windows.

Finally, the company was facing issues with customer legacy systems, with some clients being unable to migrate from older operating system versions. OEDIV needed a strategy to keep these legacy systems maintained without incurring massive manual overhead.

Overall, the discrepancy between different Linux distributions, and their support models, led OEDIV to reevaluate their approach. OEDIV selected Ubuntu for a large part of their general-purpose infrastructure, a decision driven by its flexibility and the comprehensive support provided by Ubuntu Pro. While other operating systems remained necessary for some clients, Ubuntu Pro brought extensive support and stability that was simply unrivaled.

Solution

A large factor in OEDIV’s decision to standardize on Ubuntu was Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s comprehensive subscription for open source security. They didn’t just want to standardize their distro: they wanted to standardize support for thousands of open source packages across all their web services and data platforms. With Ubuntu Pro, OEDIV receives patching and maintenance for tens of thousands of packages from the open source universe. Before Ubuntu Pro, OEDIV faced significant version gaps in other enterprise Linux distributions, which often forced them to self-compile software or pay considerable service fees to use provided packages.

With Ubuntu Pro, OEDIV is able to offer better and easier hardening and security updates to its customers, allowing customers to more easily meet security and compliance requirements. A major part of this solution is the ability to promptly address vulnerabilities, which is a non-negotiable requirement for their critical infrastructure clientele and larger customers with internal Security Operations Center (SOC) mandates.

This was achieved through features such as instant compliance checks via the pro status command, and the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG), which was especially helpful for fast CIS hardening and Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) compliance. For customers unable to migrate from older releases of Ubuntu, Ubuntu’s Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) keeps older Ubuntu LTS releases patched and maintained for up to 15 years.

Results

OEDIV’s wider adoption of Ubuntu Pro fundamentally transformed their operational efficiency and expanded their scope of business. They saw substantial time savings, across both business-as-usual tasks and upgrades – both of which previously presented complications. OEDIV estimated that system maintenance now takes 70-80% less time, while the time needed for version updates has shrunk from a 3 hour migration on other Linux distributions to just 45 minutes on Ubuntu, freeing up valuable staff time.

In addition to efficiency, Ubuntu Pro has had a marked effect on system stability. Since standardizing with Ubuntu Pro, OEDIV reports that their Ubuntu systems have not required a single standby call in several years. Ubuntu’s robustness and ability to perform across diverse environments, backed by the peace of mind of expansive patching through Ubuntu Pro, has made Ubuntu a solid foundation for a large part of OEDIV’s infrastructure, which comprises 4,500 Linux systems in total. Today, Ubuntu serves as the all-round OS that OEDIV uses for databases, webservice, data services, app services, across over 800 systems.

In business terms, this increased efficiency and stability has unlocked significant business growth. By gaining the ability to officially support a wider universe of open source packages, OEDIV broke free from a model that restricted them to a more set of software solutions. They are now equipped to fulfill almost any open source software request a client might have, allowing them to take on a far wider range of projects and better meet complex customer needs.

Thanks to these successes, Ubuntu is set to become much more central to OEDIV's operations moving forward. Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro will allow OEDIV to react to major business and industry shifts more easily, offer a broader range of services, and open up their business operations to a range of industries, use cases, and activities that were previously impossible – creating additional sources of business revenue.