Hatton Marketing

We often get asked the question, “Is open-source secure? The company that we spoke to before said that their proprietary CMS is more secure than any open-source”  It’s a good question and if you’re considering re-building your site it’s one that needs to be covered off early in the decision making process. 

The very nature of open source is the practice of software development where the source code is available to the public at no cost.  Drupal is a particular web based platform which is developed by a community of developers around the world for general public use. 

The Drupal community care so much about security that they have a security team who collect any reported security issues and resolve them immediately.  When the issue is resolved a new release is published.  If the security issue is within a specific module the team will deal with it straight away.  If it’s not fixed within a month a security announcement is sent out and the module is taken out of circulation and unpublished. 

It’s also prudent to point to out that your CMS platform is only as secure as the server you host it on.  Being on shared hosting presents more possible risks as they have other kinds of potentially vulnerable sites hosted on them that others can upload to.  A dedicated server is much more secure as you control exactly who is running code on it and what the code is.

If your website is business critical then security is paramount.  In our opinion Drupal is as secure as anything and more secure than most things, though there is always some risk.  You can minimise your risk by:

• Hosting your site on a dedicated server
• Updating, maintaining and upgrading your site
• Using Drupal developers who are experienced and have a good track record in Drupal development

If you’re looking for a new website with a content management system, good security, well over 5000 modules and provides you the freedom to move web agency’s whenever you want you should be thinking about Drupal.

And if you’re still concerned about how secure Drupal is - how concerned about security do you think the White House is?  Care to guess what open-source platform starting with “D” www.whitehouse.gov runs on?