Microsoft out to fight threat from Linux

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Kolkata, April 26: Microsoft wants to put to rest all the perception and speculation about the vulnerability of its server and desktop operating systems in India compared with various Linux flavours like Red Hat and SuSe.

Abhijit Das, manager, platform strategy of Microsoft India, is hopping from one metro to other with his Toshiba laptop to give presentation before his corporate clients on how they can ensure a secured computing environment.

It is just not a security awareness campaign only. Mr Das’ presentation also contains various comparative studies like how Microsoft has been able to reduce the risk timings in the recent years for its customers after the system being attacked by a virus compared with its close rivals in the enterprise segment like Red Hat and SuSe Linux.

“In recent times, the number of security bulletins and number of vulnerability we fixed for Windows 2003 is much less than Red Hat or SuSe enterprise versions,” said Mr Das.

VVR Babu, chief information officer of ITC , feels that there is a perception among CIOs that Windows are more vulnerable to security glitches. But thehackers give more time to find loopholes in Windows compared with other Unix operating systems.

“After all people love to hack Windows since it affects billions of users compared with few millions if they try to find loopholes for various flavours of Unix operating system including Linux,” says Mr Babu. That could be the reason why for many CIOs the number of security breaches and vulnerability threat are much more prominent in Windows server when compared with Linux platform.

Following Bill Gates launch of “Trustworthy Computing Initiative,” Microsoft in India has started series of initiatives called “know your customers”, which would facilitate the company to understand the security needs of its customers.

So if holding conference on security is one of the initiatives, there are also other levels of actions from Microsoft. One is the ongoing programme to build corporate database of Microsoft’s customers so that whenever there is a release of a patch, service pack or a security alert from Microsoft, the corporates can immediatley act.