The frugal CSO
Last month a gave a short presentation on free and low cost security tools to the Ottawa chapter of ISSA.
The slides are now available: The Frugal CSO: IT Security Tools for Tough Times (pdf).
This presentation was to raise awareness of the availability and quality of some of the leading free / open source and low cost security software.
Unlike the U.S. and European governments, the Canadian federal government has never officially blessed the use of open source. There are a ton of deployments, but they tend to be isolated, small and kept really quiet.
There are many outstanding open source and low cost security products out there, and there are few, if any, valid reasons to exclude them from consideration when evaluating products.