Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:
- policy control
- Software Center with software allow lists
- controlled OS updates
- zscaler
- software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
- antivirus
- VPN
I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.
What is ‘unallowed software’? A shell script the user wrote? Something they downloaded and compiled?
Limiting that seems fundamentally at odds with FOSS.
But not at odds with running a corporate environment.
Of course not, but you have to either trust your users to some extent or give them a system that’s locked down to the point of hindering them.
Rule one of IT is to forbid software installs.
Could be things to execute. They may run a shell script (source it if they don’t have exec permission), but they won’t have all the previleged commands (definitely no dd)
Granted most open source free software don’t have licenses that limit usage like many commercial software. You might want to keep track of the commercial software. Or look for versions that have important vulnerabilities.
First, you can run proprietary software on free software. So, running free software does not preclude license monitoring. It is also possible that certain licenses are not allowed even if they are approved by the FSF or OSI.
The goal more broadly is enforcing corporate policies around risk or whatever else needs to be enforced.
It may be that you HAVE to use certain kinds of software ( VPN was mentioned ). Perhaps you are NOT allowed to use certain software on work computers ( torrents and Steam clients come to mind ) or visit some kinds of websites.
The other risk that a company may want to monitor is ensuring software is up to date ( open source or not ). Stale software can have vulnerabilities that become attack vectors for the bad guys.
Finally there is access control, privileged access, and auditing. There may be systems or data that employees are not allowed to access or are only allowed to access under certain conditions.
I am not advocating anything here but it is totally normal for corporate IT to be tasked with limiting corporate risk and creating an auditable history of compliance. These are the kinds of tools and policies they use.