The Value of Open Source for Mid-Market Firms

How open source software can ease move to cloud for mid-market firms

Published October 2019

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The use of cloud services is being increasingly accepted by mid-market organisations, especially when combined with on-premise IT in a hybrid environment.

But IT managers in these firms still say they have apprehensions that need to be addressed, such as the operational cost of using cloud, the security of enterprise data, the availability of technical support, and questions about application suitability and latency.

These views appear to be particularly prevalent among mid-sized firms that don’t have the same amount of technical, administrative and wider management resources that larger enterprises have to draw upon.

The cloud model of service-based application processing, storage and analytics is an undeniable sea change in terms of how firms build, manage, develop and maintain their corporate IT. Even for businesses with fewer than 100 employees or, perhaps, less than 50, the move to cloud is a new architectural thrust that affects all of IT; it is not simply a new application roll-out programme or a departmentally confined upgrade.

This is where open source software offers a potential opportunity to mitigate these concerns, tapping into the global support base for platforms such as Linux as they now exist in their robust enterprise-grade state.