"When it came time to secure the Web servers from
intrusion, we looked over a few firewall appliances, but the costs
were prohibitive. Fortunately, Linux's ipchains offers a firewall
for inbound as well as outbound traffic and even provides for
network address translation to allow us to run our application
separated from the Internet on a private network behind yet another
firewall. Coupled with Tripwire and Snort, which detect unexpected
modifications to files and analyze logs for intrusions, turning off
all Internet services that are not needed, removing all unneeded
user accounts, and ensuring high-quality passwords for the accounts
that remain has shown Linux to be very secure and robust.
In the end, the open-source community of developers has been
wonderful for our startup. The savings in up-front costs, the
highly reliable and feature-rich software, and the excellent
support networks allow us to be successful in providing a
reasonably priced secure document delivery and e-signature solution
to our business clients.
Although we are happy that we can easily run our software on
Solaris, iPlanet, Oracle, and BEA for those clients that demand it,
we're more than happy with the results we've gotten from the hard
work and dedication of many untold open-source contributors."