Cloudera Exec Explains Open Source Cost, Risk Reductions

Lower costs, reduced risks, and shorter time to achieving mission values are goals that are all within reach for government agencies that choose to work with enterprise data cloud provider Cloudera for support in open-source technical operations.
That’s the message from Henry Sowell, CIO at Cloudera Government Solutions in a new podcast hosted by Cloudera and MeriTalk. As a follow-up to the June 25 “Out in the Open: Success with Supported Open Source” webinar, the podcast discusses open source software, the innovations that it can bring to government, and the importance of working with private sector partners who deliver support and security to the effort.
In the complementary podcast, Sowell explains how his service in the military and Federal law enforcement revealed the limitations of problem solving in a silo-heavy information environment, and how the use of open source software and communities can greatly improve project outcomes.
But government organizations undertaking open source work without the benefit of support from companies like Cloudera also face a host of risks including security issues, and sharply increasing costs for platform maintenance.
“Going unsupported introduces significant amounts of risk,” Sowell says in the podcast. “When you have production problems … and security problems … you need that support and enterprise cloud readiness,” that Cloudera brings, he said.
Sowell goes on to talk about Cloudera’s engagement with a Defense Department organization using open source software that delivered to the government customer 24/7 operational support, the ability to track security vulnerabilities, and significant reductions in maintenance costs.
That allowed the customer to “focus on their mission, not on maintaining the platform,” Sowell said. And the customer then was able to take project savings and apply those to improve mission outcomes.
For the whole story, we invite you to listen to the podcast.