A recent Red Hat survey has uncovered something that might not surprise anyone in the open source world—that open source software is dominating the large-scale business IT landscape. In fact, the results of this survey indicate that proprietary software is on the decline, while open source software is seeing a dramatic rise in deployment.

From the survey, 95% of respondents claimed that open source is strategically important, while 36% said it was very important. Of those respondents, only 5% declared open source was only somewhat important.

The survey also indicated that 77% of respondents agreed that enterprise adoption will continue to grow, with 45% saying it will increase slightly and 32% stating it will increase significantly. Only 22% of respondents claimed open source adoption will remain the same and 1% replied to say it would slightly decrease.

What areas are finding the highest rate of open source adoptions? According to the survey respondents, those areas are:

• Security - with 52% of respondents claiming it as a top usage.

• Cloud management tools - with 51% of respondents claiming it as a top usage.

• Database - with 49% of respondents claiming it as a top usage.

• Big data and analytics - with 47% of respondents claiming it as a top usage.

Finally, the benefits of open source software in the enterprise was broken down by respondents claiming that higher quality software, lower TCO, better security, better cloud-native tech, and safer levering of tech were the top benefits of using open source software.