Case Study: Reliant Security Innovates With Open Source Software

Retailers that want to accept credit cards need to demonstrate that their systems are Payment-Card-Industry- (PCI-) compliant. The problem is that implementing PCI compliance can be expensive, and retailers really don't get much additional revenue from their PCI investments. Reliant Security offers a PCI compliance solution that makes substantial use of open source software (OSS) to help drive out cost while raising flexibility. Reliant Security's managing partners made sure that they developed a concise, developer-friendly OSS policy that focused on cost avoidance. They also worked with external legal counsel to make sure that their commercial licenses, software acquisition policies, and ALM processes allowed them to exploit OSS components while fulfilling licensing obligations and providing full transparency to customers. As a result, Reliant Security has helped customers achieve PCI compliance with substantial cost savings. Although Reliant Security is an independent software vendor (ISV), its tactics for avoiding software capital expenses are equally appropriate for IT shops with systems made up of large numbers of geographically distributed system nodes.