Does open source work in sensitive sectors like telecom, you ask? Well, says, ‘Yes’ with loads of confidence. Open source technologies form the basis of the tech stack in his company and with some of his key customers too. Jayadevan not only uses them fo
CTO, Mahindra Comviva
TDiksha P. Gupta
Open Source For You here are many CTOs across the country, who are still contemplating the usage of open source technologies and then, there are many, who have pioneered its use. We are talking to one from the latter group. Ganesh Jayadevan, CTO, Mahindra Comviva, has mastered the art of using open source technologies not only within his premises, but also encourages his customers to do the same. And he does this with loads of confidence. He shares his open source tech deployments: “Our company is about 15 years old and since the very beginning, we have been embracing open source. We started with the Linux platform. We have been using Apache for a very long time. MySQL has been my favourite for years now. So, to give you a short and sweet answer, we have been embracing Linux for about 15 years now, right from the time we began our journey. As more and more open source components keep coming up, we add them to our stack, based on our needs. We keep upgrading to open source technologies every now and then.”
Jayadevan uses open source technologies in every possible domain. He informs, “To elaborate, we use open source on the operating system side. However, we just don’t go out there and pick up a nightly build; we go through Red Hat or a company like that. I think Red Hat is doing a decent job of curating Linux. So, we buy their support. When it comes to using Linux at Mahindra Comviva, we do that at the level of operating systems, Web servers, databases, and on the applications side. We use open source tools in the smallest possible places; like, for image processing, we use an open source tool called OpenCV.”
In a domain in which the use of open source technologies has been considered a risky proposition, we wonder how comfortable Jayadevan is with these technologies and how he manages the risk factor. He answers with a smile, “So far, we haven’t faced any opposition from the customers of our technologies. As long as we take care of the security requirements, they are quite happy. However, there are customers who specify certain things at the time of the agreement. MTN Africa has an agreement with our group, which states that its products should not be shipped with MySQL. They largely prefer Oracle versions. To conclude, we don’t see any perceived threats because of open source and whatever security has to be addressed, we do that. We do our regular audits. We have security professionals coming in and doing audits of our development process, our product processes; and whatever points they highlight, we take care of them. So, open source itself doesn’t hinder us in any way. There is no anxiety around using open source and, with respect to security, we have not faced any glitches because we do the necessary hardening.”
Explaining the details of the security hardening process the company follows, Jayadevan states, “There are two large areas that I can identify for which security hardening is required. One is the operating system hardening itself. There are security tools that we have identified and use for this. Second, on the