Governments globally are embracing open source policies. The White House moved its Web platform to open source this past fall with the goal of reducing costs and improving security. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., shares his views on why governments are embracing open source solutions, relaying six key reasons, and offers some guidelines on evaluating open source products.
The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers.
Correos is the operator of the public postal service in Spain. Recently, it decided to build a secure email service for up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos designed and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform for its new email service based on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek technology.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is working with Sun, Apple and Red Hat "to develop secure baselines for their products," commented Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, on Nov. 17 at a hearing before the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO recently released policy guidance promoting the use of open source software throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD is not the only area where the federal government is embracing open source, so is the White House, whose Web site now runs on open source technologies. "By choosing open source software as the defining technology of Whitehouse.gov, it is clear that the President means business," said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal.
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