Quality and security are the advantages of open source

In its State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, publisher Red Hat surveyed nearly 1,300 IT decision makers around the world about their perception of enterprise open source solutions. Among the lessons learned from this study is the predominantly positive perception that decision-makers have of the security of open source solutions: 89% believe that the security of these is equivalent to or better than that of proprietary solutions.

Respondents explain this view for several reasons: 55% say their teams can use well-tested open source code for their internal applications, 52% say security patches are well documented and can be scanned, and 51% think vendors quickly make patches available to fix vulnerabilities. In addition, 44% believe that open source code is scrutinized by more people than that of proprietary tools, and 38% say that their teams can audit the code themselves. These motivations are reflected in the top benefits associated with enterprise open source solutions, the top two being security (32%) and increased software quality (32%).

Enterprise open source supports emerging technologies

Companies are already making extensive use of emerging technologies: 71% mention artificial intelligence and machine learning; as much as the Internet of Things (IoT). 68% use containers (70% of respondents also work in organizations using Kubernetes) and 61% use serverless computing. In these different areas, open source is predominant, and 80% of respondents expect to see their use of enterprise open source solutions increase on these technologies. Enterprise open source responds to several challenges, firstly the modernization of IT infrastructures (62%), followed by digital transformation (54%). Application development (52%) and application modernization (48%) are also present, although mentioned a little less.

Respondents were also asked about the proportion of free and proprietary software used. If proprietary solutions remain in the majority (45% against 29% for enterprise open source and 21% for community open source), within two years the responses reveal an upward trend for open source ( +5% for enterprise open source and +3% for community open source), while, conversely, proprietary solutions should decrease, dropping to 37%.