Security is one of the chief concerns of IT decision makers. Along with purchase price, interoperability, maintainability and deployment costs, security is a critical factor in determining which platform to deploy across an enterprise or to serve a particular role.

For proprietary and open source software (OSS) alike, administering security updates are a reality in the enterprise and a significant factor in total cost of ownership (TCO). In order to get an accurate picture of how costs associated with patch management figure into the TCO equation, Microsoft recently commissioned Wipro Technologies Ltd., an independent consulting firm, to study the cost of updating Microsoft and open source software in a real-world environment for desktops, servers and database servers.

Wipro surveyed 90 companies in the U.S. and Western Europe with 2,500 to 113,000 employees where both the Windows and open source operating systems were simultaneously being run. When the costs of updating are distributed across the size of the environment and evaluated on a per-asset basis, the study shows Microsoft software to be less expensive to patch than open source equivalents. These findings confirm what many customers are experiencing in their deployment scenarios.