Experience enhanced security with dedicated Windows hosting

Windows server security was made a top priority by Microsoft about three years ago. Since then Microsoft have invested heavily in a multi-pronged effort to improve software quality and development processes, and to reduce the risks for customers through education and guidance, industry collaboration and enforcement.

Microsoft is the only software platform to have invested as much in security R&D, process improvements and customer education.

However, Linux has often been touted as a more secure platform. In part, this is because of the "many eyeballs" maxim of open source software that claims a correlation between the number of developers looking at code and the number of bugs found and resolved.

While this has some validity, it is not necessarily the best way to develop secure software for Window servers. Microsoft believe in the effectiveness of a structured software engineering process that includes a deep focus on quality, technology advances, and vigorous testing to make their Window servers more secure.

Are Linux servers more secure than Window servers?

It has been questioned as to how safe the Linux platform really is by a number of third-party reports. One of these reports titled ‘Is Linux more secure than Windows?’ is a recent independent study by Forrester, highlighted that the four major Linux distributions have a higher incidence and severity of vulnerabilities, and are slower than Microsoft to provide security updates.

Microsoft had the lowest elapsed time between disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of a fix, according to Forrester.

They found that all of the 128 publicly security flaws in Window servers over the 12-month period studied were addressed by Microsoft, and that its security updates predated major outbreaks by an average of 305 days.

Similar conclusions are shown by other independent sources of data. According to statistics posted on the security website Secunia, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 has averaged 7.4 security advisories per month, compared with 1.7 advisories for Window Server 2003.

And as Yankee Group noted in its Linux, Unix and Windows TCO Comparison study, "Linux-specific worms and viruses are every bit as pernicious as their Unix and Window counterparts and in many cases they are much more stealthy."

Find out more about scalability and performance of Microsoft Windows or request more information online about dedicated Windows hosting.