Astaro White Paper Sample

Myth One: Open Source Software Is Too Risky for IT Security

Many IT decision makers have a knee-jerk reaction to OSS, especially when it comes to security. They believe OSS is most appropriate for do-it-yourself technology geeks working in their basements. It might be fine for a company with an obsessive technology savant on staff, but for the rest of us, OSS is unproven, complex, and risky.

That’s the myth. The reality is that OSS is already part of most ITinfrastructures. A recent magazine article looked at the state of open source adoption within the enterprise and found it widely pervasive. It states, 'Most of the packaged security appliances for everything from firewalls to security information management are built on the same BSD Unix and Linux distributions as the application servers you build yourself.

A recent Forrester Research report further argued that enterprises should seriously consider open source options for mission-critical infrastructure. "Although fewer than half of the large enterprises in Europe and North America are actively using or piloting open source software, a majority of those are using it for mission-critical applications and infrastructure," the report said. The debate about open-source vs. proprietary solutions has long been discussed, and generally open-source critiques attack the stability of the platforms as not ready for widespread adoption due to their ever-changing natures as they evolve from more contributions to their features and code. They also criticize open-source for requiring so many patches to stay secure.....