LONDON, UK – Canonical announces the lifecycle extension of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ‘Trusty Tahr’ and 16.04 LTS ‘Xenial Xerus’ to a total of ten years. This lifecycle extension enables organizations to balance their infrastructure upgrade costs, by giving them additional time to implement their upgrade plan. The prolonged Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS enables a secure and low-maintenance infrastructure with security updates and kernel livepatches provided by Canonical. The announcement represents a significant opportunity for the organisations currently implementing their transition to new applications and technologies.
“With the prolonged lifecycle of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS, we’re entering a new page in our commitment to enabling enterprise environments” said Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Product Manager at Canonical. “Each industry sector has its own deployment lifecycle and adopts technology at a different pace. We are bringing an operating system lifecycle that lets organisations manage their infrastructure on their terms.”
While organizations have been putting significant effort and budget to phase out legacy systems, these efforts have significantly increased the IT budgets over the past 3 years. By prolonging the operating system lifecycle to ten years, Canonical enables organizations to better balance their IT budget in order to implement or plan their infrastructure upgrade.
Organisations are constantly being challenged by attackers taking advantage of vulnerabilities to gain access or deploy malware. ISO 27000, NIST, PCI, or CIS Controls… whatever cybersecurity framework an organisation picks, Ubuntu offers them an implementation path. Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and kernel Livepatching provide the necessary foundations for continuous vulnerability management. Extended Security Maintenance ensures that the Ubuntu OS receives security updates, while the Livepatch service reduces the unplanned work that comes from Linux kernel vulnerabilities, making organisations more effective when managing Ubuntu systems.
You can find more information about the coverage of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS on ubuntu.com/security/esm.
A summary of the detailed changes is shown in the table below.
| RELEASE | RELEASE DATE | END OF LIFE* |
| Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) | April 2014 | April 2024(from April 2022) |
| Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) | April 2016 | April 2026(from April 2024) |
| Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) | April 2018 | April 2028(unchanged) |
| Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) | April 2020 | April 2030(unchanged) |
* Canonical no longer releases updates after the end of life of a release.
About Canonical
Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for container, cloud, and hyperscale computing. Through its open-source tools, snaps for packaging your ROS project and Ubuntu Core to enhance security for mission-critical robots, Canonical has also been supporting the management and upgrading of robot software, a common and significant problem faced by the community. Learn more here>.
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