Hortonworks’ Shaun Bierweiler on Enterprise Open Source’s Security Edge Over Proprietary Software

Shaun Bierweiler, vice president of U.S. public sector at Hortonworks, told Datanami in an interview published Tuesday about the advantage of adopting an open approach to technology development in the big data space.

“When you think about integration points, and the various technologies and players coming to market, if you don’t have an open approach and open model and open interfaces, it’s really difficult costly and time-consuming to bring those pieces together,” he said.

Bierweiler said he believes enterprise open source software tools are more secure than proprietary platforms.

“The approach of having that many different individuals hammering it and searching through it, we do find that there’s a higher ability to identify defects before they become defects, or to address them much quicker due to the size of the community or the breadth of the exposure,” he said of the open source community.

He called on organizations to perform due diligence before introducing free-and-open-source software into networks.

“It’s important to understand the source of the code and the process it’s gone through before you put it on your network,” Bierweiler added.