by CIO Staff

Q&A on Open Source with Jack Ondeck of Bristol West Insurance Group

News
Sep 01, 20051 min
Open Source

Do you use open source as your main operating system in a mission-critical environment?

As an insurance company, we need high reliability and constant uptime. When we moved our primary data center three years ago, we consolidated servers and upgraded our systems. During the planning phase, our technical architect proposed converting our Microsoft-based operating systems to Linux. At the time, this was a radical concept because we were discussing our main production systems—not some ancillary system.

After a thorough analysis, we decided to go with Linux. After deployment, we realized that although very few of our initial assumptions were accurate, we gained additional benefits that we had not anticipated: