[amadio]

I take issue with this part of the article:

> In general, managed tools will give you stronger governance and access controls compared to open source solutions. For businesses dealing with sensitive data that requires a robust security model, commercial solutions may be worth investing in, as they can provide an added layer of reassurance and a stronger audit trail.

There are definitely open source solutions capable of managing vast amounts of data securely. The storage group at CERN develops EOS (a distributed filesystem based on the XRootD framework), and CERNBox, which puts a nice web interface on top. See https://github.com/xrootd/xrootd and https://github.com/cern-eos/eos for more information. See also https://techweekstorage.web.cern.ch, a recent event we had along with CS3 at CERN.

[AnthonyMouse]

Not only that, open source and proprietary software both generally handle the common case well, because otherwise nobody would use it.

It's when you start doing something outside the norm that you notice a difference. Neither of them will be perfect when you're the first person trying to do something with the software, but for proprietary software that's game over, because you can't fix it yourself.

[datadrivenangel]

Your options are to use off the shelf and end up with a brittle and janky setup, or use open source and end up with a brittle and janky setup that is more customized to your workflows... It's a tradeoff though, and all the hosting and security work of open source can be a huge time sink.

[AnthonyMouse]

You don't actually have to do any of that work if you don't want to. Half the open source software companies have that as their business model -- you can take the code and do it yourself or you can buy a support contract and they do it for you. But then you can make your own modifications even if you're paying someone to handle the rest of it.