The inherent security of the Linux environment was a key motivation for Burlington Coat Factory in choosing the operating system for a large retail point-of-sale environment.
The fact that Linux is an open operating system makes it inherently more secure, says CIO Mike Prince. "Anybody can examine the source code looking for vulnerabilities, but you can't look at the Windows source code for vulnerabilities," he explains. "If there is a problem, anyone can address and fix it. There is an entire community of people who can plug the gap virtually instantaneously." That last factor also makes Linux a less inviting target for virus writers, he says.
Whether Linux is truly more secure than Windows is a matter of opinion, says Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group, a Franklin, Tenn., retail consultancy. Although there are good reasons for moving to Linux, security is not necessarily one of them, he says.
"In theory, [Linux] is probably more secure than standard Windows, but in actuality, the number of Linux systems out there is so small that no one can judge it one way or another," he says. "Linux advocates try to claim this, but the very nature of code being [open source] actually opens up more potential concerns than something like Windows 2000 in the POS area."
But compared with DOS--the operating system on which Burlington Coat Factory's former POS system rested--Linux is certainly a better choice when it comes to security, Prince says.
"You could stick a floppy disk into a DOS-based register, boot it up, and run anything on it or get at the C: drive and access the data files. It's very hard to block that in the DOS environment other than taking the floppy disk drive out," he says. "It's a lot harder to boot these Linux boxes that way, but it's easy to lock down Linux so someone who has access to it would have a difficult time hacking out of that environment into something where they could do some harm."
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