BANAGALORE, INDIA: eSoft, a leading software vendor, has been trying to cut costs in several ways that range from Network monitoring to Internet traffic regulation. The general upkeep is high and need to innovate to reduce costs is on the top of the list.

"We are in the service industry and staying online 24/7 is of supreme importance. We used as many as 5 ISPs but after a one time investment and switching to a BGP network we can now function on 3 ISPs." Though the reduction in costs were significant what made Hussain proud was his Open source software usage. Hussain employed several tricks but the one that worked for him-software for firewalls and network administration.

"We customized all open source software as per our needs," Hussain said. He employed open source products on physical devices for firewalling. The company usually installed firewalls for at least 200 users and the costs were significant. By using a blend of different tools and customizing each one to plug the gaps that regular anti-malware software fail to address he has been able to not only stop infections but championed the cause of open source by almost eliminating the use of expensive firewalls. "There are products that for minimum costs can secure extensive networks," Hussain explained.

Hussain also abused his open source fetish for network monitoring. "We initially had a team of seven people looking into the physical health of the servers and the switches." The cost, salary and the possibility of errors was high. More often than not, these seven people had different areas of expertise and hence efficiency was lowered. The mix of open source software available for download free of cost now allows him to monitor the health remotely and increases efficiency.