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Is It Time to Dump Windows?
Introduction
In 2004-5 Microsoft avoided a disaster by ramping up it’s security efforts. Thanks to the continuous public vulnerabilities in their Windows OS, Internet Explorer, IIS, and Word it was becoming extremely expensive to maintain a Windows environment, especially for the SMB. Microsoft went on a hiring binge of security experts, trained all of their developers in secure coding practices and introduced a new set of desktop protections. But did Microsoft succeed in making their products a safe choice for SMB?
Analysis
It is almost impossible for the SMB to use Windows products and not have to fight continuous infections and even rebuild/re-image machines on a regular basis. Just in the past few weeks there have been major vulnerabilities discovered that forced Microsoft to issue fix-it tools in advance of official patches. The latest shortcut vulnerability is particularly onerous. It led Siemens to announce they had discovered a USB delivered attack that targeted manufacturers using SCADA networks. The fix turns the familiar shortcut icons on your desktop into blank images. At what point does the cost of this additional maintenance exceed the switching costs to move to another platform? And on top of the operational costs there is the unquantifiable cost of a data breach. I believe that that point has finally arrived.
Yes, MAC OS and Linux based desktop environments such as Ubuntu have their security issues. But they are not continuously targeted by every cyber criminal and scam artist in the world. There are sometimes 50,000 new forms of malware for Windows released in a day. The other platforms? You can count the malware of concern on one hand.
What would it take for the typical small business to migrate off of Windows? Here is the short list. Let me know if you have experience with these or other options:
Office productivity. How to get away from using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc? he most straightforward migration is to OpenOffice, supported by Sun (now Oracle). It is easy to install and easy to get used to. Google Apps are another alternative but it is yet unclear if Google’s treatment of your data is always going to be secure.
Email. This is the hard one. Most SMBs are married to Exchange and Outlook. The same functionality can be had from myriad products, many open source, such as Mozilla Thunderbird. And free SMTP servers predate Microsoft’s products. Of course Gmail, and Yahoo! email are cheap alternatives that many SMBs already use.
All of your applications. There are Linux based versions of just about any application you need to conduct business. Have you developed your own Windows based apps? Time to consider migrating those too.
Conclusion
Have you noticed that most of the security practitioners you meet or work with have already switched to Apple? I have resisted doing so all these years because it seemed like giving up the battle. Without knowing firsthand the issues my clients had to deal with how could I speak to those problems? Recently IT-Harvest’s office computers all became infected with a zero day Trojan. None of the five security suites we tried can eradicate the infection. Our network defenses block the beaconing back to servers in Russia and China but the radical cleansing process with multiple anti-malware products has disabled sound card drivers, WiFi connectivity, and system performance. Rather than rebuild or make the switch to Windows 7 IT-Harvest is going to move to Ubuntu. We will report on the experience here on Focus.com. If you have war stories to tell on your own Windows nightmares and your transition efforts please chime in.
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15 Comments
Security is more of a people issue than it is a technology one. People who click on the wrong kind of emails will do so on whatever platform they happen to be running on. And whatever platform they are running on will evolve to support all the interoperation and cross application interaction that business demands, putting us right back into the same place.
The Mac OS, which has *nix underpinnings, also has security bugs and other problems at the OS and application layer (more so the latter), and this is because of all the integration points with other software.
Moving to some other platform will result in a brief lull, followed by the malware community moving to where the victims are. And the victims will still click on the wrong emails and fall for the same social engineering problems as they always have, unless we continue to train and educate them.
Technology is a small part of the security problem.
-ASB: http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker
The one this that can not be overlooked is cost. Windows based systems are far cheaper than Mac's and with the emergance of Driod the iPad and iPod may meet their match. Linux is great if you know what you are doing. I love my iPhone and my iPod, but for someone to bash windows security...? If OSX had a 10th of the market share hackers would deem it worth while to attack it. As it stands now whats the point a lot of work for no glory. And not to harp on Apple, but a company that pulls negative feedback from their forums on a regular basis is troublesome.
An important issue is being overlooked here - most end users are both familiar with Windows (especially more "mature" ones) and adverse to change. I liken it to the whole electric car movement, everyone thinks it's a good idea but no one wants to give up the familiarity and flexibility of the old standard. Until some fully functional, user friendly, "Windows like" experience is available it's going to meet with a lot of resistance.
As far as the whole "do we need to rethink the office desktop mindset" there are always going to be jobs that need someone sitting in front of a full fledged computer - an IPad really isn't going to cut it for that emergency dispatcher or help desk worker. While I float around several locations I still need a full featured laptop to get my job done right and I don't see that changing.
Funny to see this.. As I'm currently watching a podcast debate on if Apple should dump the desktop..
Good post, but I think it's important to mention that Ubuntu and other Linuxes (and in fact the major BSDs) make maintainence a lot easier than the Microsoft options because they have fairly sane package systems. And for desktop use, a typical Linux will have Openoffice, Firefox and either Thunderbird or Evolution either in the base install or about three mouse clicks away.
I dumped Microsoft quite a while back myself, using mainly OpenBSD for anything important and various Linuxes where that's the low-maintenance option. But for the usual perverse reasons I find that I occasionally need a Windows system around -- and that one becomes usable only after 45 minutes of downloading the latest emergency patches every time it's turned on. Sad but true.
I still don't think Linux is ready for the average SMB employee. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and have been running Ubuntu for several years now but, it still takes good technical knowledge to operate and occasionally fix the fixes. I've experienced display, sound and other minor issues quickly but for Non Tech Savvy users these would have been a huge frustration.
IMHO Ubuntu and other distro's and getting very close to prime time, but they're not there just yet.
Cheers,,,
I think Linux flavour like Ubuntu is good alternative, This is what I am using for quite some time now and very comfortable.
Really? We must live in different worlds then. I think this article needed a bit more background research before writing – instead of a stupid user bringing down the network so then the author writes this pretending to be fully informed on the subject.
- Mac OS X is the easiest modern OS to penetrate – once it gains install base, there will be real problems there.
- Antivirus software is usually terrible at the clean-up after an infection. Tools like Sysinternals are the best for the cleanup.
- If you are switching OSs, I would defiantly go Linux over Mac. (openSUSE over Ubuntu for SMB in my opinion)
Nooo! It is time for Apple to move into SMB and recover lost ground! The iPad is going to get traction with the business traveler, next step is the desktop!
it is always fun reading articles that bash Microsoft. Kinda like bashing the government - very easy to do. Should an SMB use Microsoft, or Apple or a variant of Linux/unix? The answer should be driven by business needs. Most SMB's do not have a training budget and have to hire people that can use the tools the company has in place. So if your finances are run on Quickbooks chances are you will find a finance person that is familiar with windows. if you use the Mac for video editing you will probably hire someone familiar with that environment. If you can run your business on an IPAD, then have at it. Anyone that gets into these religious wars quickly loses sight of business goals. I guess if you are a business of 1 you can believe in whatever religion you want. I run a small business and provide our employees with the tools they need to help me run and manage my business. We use Windows on the desktop with both windows and linux servers, Android and Windows Mobile cellular platforms. Why, not because i am a fanatic about any of these platforms but because our desktop tools ran on windows. The server applications drove the server decisions.
Yes, I sure hope they don't dump the desktop, as I'm just buying into Apple.
I've long been the proponent of pushing Linux into my work environments. And the one thing that would seal the deal at most places is Microsoft Office for Linux. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for over 10 years now, but have recently been using more and more Mac, as I can do my development on there, as well as have access to Microsoft Office (natively) when it comes to document exchange.
Sadly while its been possible to shift certain teams over to Linux completely, there is still always the reliance on Office from time to time, as its been impossible to get executives to switch to Open Office as well, even when I was in the CTO role for a while.
Great comments/feedback from everyone. Thanks for the mostly supportive sentiments.
For Bob: Yes it is fun to bash MSFT. For the record I have shied away from it for a couple of years. I *do* bash the government though. Frequently. :-)
Microsoft has a nasty habit of doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
They should close their books and stop all business activities. To make it even better they should convince BP and Monsanto to do so as well - what a wonderful ...
Microsoft has lost touch with ease of use. Vista and Windows 7 are overblown heavy graphical (ring 0) drains which hang any system. Laptops become unusable after a year as they are so slow to boot. The MS Office suite 2007 and 2010 are very confusing and cumbersome to use. I hear the pods around me shout "wheres that command gone!!). I have been telling clients to buy Open office for free if they want to keep productivity up - KISS. Windows booting + daily security patches + vulnerabilities + abuse of file system actually adds 30 mins (Lost) for the average user per day. All the key benefits and USPs Microsoft had are now gone. The Linux and Apple platforms have become a pleasure to use. I
I wonder if it isn't time to retire the entire "desktop" concept. The iPad and iPhone seem to indicate that computers are becoming more and more appliance and gadget like. The iPad was wildly popular even though it doesn't have a traditional desktop interface (like Windows or Mac OS). So, maybe it's not only time to dump Windows, but the whole idea of sitting in front of a computer to do work. With the next generation of office workers being brought up with Ultra Portable Computers (they used to be called SmartPhones, remember?) and cloud computing, the whole Windows vs. whatever argument may be moot.
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