Open-source software is exploding in the technology world. As you may have guessed, the underlying code of open source software is available for its users to study and tinker with.
Because of this transparency, communities for open-source technology are booming and provide resources, updates, and technical help for open source programs.
The cloud has had no shortage of open-source tools brought into the market, including incredibly powerful and easy-to-use tools for customer relationship management, resource planning, scheduling, contact centers, marketing automation, and human resources management.
These publicly available cloud tools allow users to deploy ready-to-use software with more freedom and less cost to your business in as little as 10 minutes instead of weeks or months.
Here are just a few of the benefits of leveraging open-source cloud computing for your business:
1. You can get substantial cost-savings with open-source.
It’s often said that open source programs are free, but this isn’t entirely true.
Open-source software is free to install and use. Depending on the software, there’s a cost to host, secure, maintain, and update it.
Typically communities provide free resources for users to operate the programs effectively.
AWS Marketplace represents one of the fastest and most cost-effective solutions options for deploying infrastructure to power your software. Servers can be provisioned for less than a penny per hour.
This means that building a cloud infrastructure on open source programs will typically still save you money in the end.
2. You have total control of open-source code.
One of the notable features of open-source software is the ability for users to modify the tool’s code to fit their needs.
In order to get the most out of open-source software, your team needs to have the technical know-how to build and alter code.
You may also choose to work with those who can customize the code for you.
3. You have free access to dedicated communities which continuously improve on their open-source software
The majority of open-source programs have dedicated user communities.
These communities nurture experts on the tools who want to build resources to better educate new users. In addition, community-led projects to create new features, push out updates, or fix bugs are fairly common.
Users of an open-source platform can take advantage of these communal cloud-based projects.
4. You have complete control over your DATA with open-source!
Open-source applications are not commercially owned by a single party. Instead, any user of the program “owns” it.
As such, any data you place in these applications is solely owned by you – there’s no application owner to take control of your data.
Putting freedom back into the hands of the user is one of the tenets of open-source programs. That freedom extends to keeping data ownership in check.
Have questions? Want to learn more? Shoot us a message to chat about open-source software that could help you and your business.
