Security has always been important for datacenter operators, but the days of putting a ring of protection around the datacenter and then walking away satisfied in the knowledge that the data and applications therein were protected from outside forces are long over. Cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), the edge, containers and the rapid growth in the number of mobile devices have all contributed to the expansion of IT outside of core datacenters, creating a highly distributed environment where the bulk of data is created and applications are access beyond the firewall. Add in the growing numbers and increasing sophistication of cyber-threats and security becomes a much more complex calculation.
Because of this, the growing expectation for years now has been that hardware, component and software makers would embed security into their products to ensure security regardless of whether they were running in the datacenter or somewhere out in the wild. Enterprises will gravitate toward vendors with reputations for strong security and privacy features in their offerings, which can drive growth for those that make the investment. It’s something that Canonical is emphasizing as it looks to extend its open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system deeper into the enterprise and cloud datacenters.
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“Today, it’s true that we offer vastly more security coverage covering vastly more open-source packages than any other enterprise Linux company, and this is driven by significant investments that we are making in our security team’s capacity and in the capabilities that they have to find and fix security issues across the entire open source stack,” Canonical founder and chief executive officer Mark Shuttleworth said during a briefing leading up to the release this week of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, codenamed “Focal Fossa” and the next in a line of commercial-grade Ubuntu Server releases that provide long term support. “Customers over the years have asked us to provide security updates and the number of packages that they’ve asked us to provide security updates for has escalated in a very dramatic fashion. Really, what’s happening is that enterprises want much more open source than just Linux. Additionally, enterprises used to be quite conservative about what they are allowed into the buildings. They would take Linux from a trusted vendor and then applications from trusted vendors. But today we see an incredible acceleration in the widespread use of almost any open source application on the Ubuntu platform. It really is a hockey stick to address that market mix.”