Linux News Log

Salem Hospital of Oregon switches from barebones OS projects to commercialized Linux for its security.

Oregon’s capital city of Salem is located midway between Portland and Eugene in the middle of the Willamette Valley. Next to Pringle Creek Park sits the 450-bed Salem Hospital, a not-for-profit acute care facility and the city’s largest employer, with 500 physicians and 3,300 total employees.

But just as the banks of Pringle Creek are crowded with larches, mulberries, and Douglas firs, the IS department at Salem Hospital had accumulated a hodgepodge of more than a half-dozen incompatible firewalls from an assortment of vendors and free/open-source projects. The acquisition of each security device seemed cheap at the time, but the end result has been undue complexity and high administrative costs for the staff of five network engineers.

The challenge was to find some kind of perimeter security that held the sutures together and that was simple to manage and capable of locking down a heavily regulated industry environment at little to no cost. It found a solution 5,200 miles away, in Germany.

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A new survey finds that Linux is continuing to gain acceptance in the enterprise, especially in the area of messaging.

Osterman Research Inc. interviewed IT decision makers at 103 companies and found that 55% would consider switching to Linux messaging over the next two years, as long as there were no major disruptions to end users during the migration process.

Michael Osterman, principal analyst with the Black Diamond, Wash.-based research firm, said companies are warming up to Linux-based systems because they’re seen as less expensive than competing proprietary products from the likes of Microsoft and IBM Lotus, and because they’ve grown more reliable in recent years.

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