By Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr)
Tue 06 May 2014 | tags: enterprise, -- (permalink)

If you’re in an enterprise, there are often restrictions placed on using open source software. Even if there aren’t official restrictions, it’s often painful to get unsupported packages into the advertised software repositories. For some, one option is to spin up a server VM (in-house or on AWS) and use R or RStudio Server that way, but many folks want or need to run it on their workstations and have no “official” way to do so.

We mentioned Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) in our book as one path to using R in the enterprise since it is a commercial offering (and adds quite a few very nice features [PDF] to the R environment). However, if your department’s budget can’t handle the RRE licensing costs or you don’t need the extra features (yet), Revolution Analytics now provides another option to helping you make R a part of your enterprise toolbox.

Their new AdviseR program (yes, we R folk tend to capitalize all our “R“‘s a bit too often) lets you get full, live human technical support and access to their community support forumns, R knowledge bank and free monthly webinars for just under $800.00USD per-year. There are many more benefits to the AdviseR program listed on their site.

As we say in Maine, this is a wicked-good deal. These folks are super-smart, give back to the community on a regular basis and have a boatload of knowledge to share. If this post feels like an advert, I feel compelled to point out that we, here, at DDS are not affiliated with Revolution Analytics in any way (apart from being fans) and get nothing more out of pimping AdviseR than a chance to help out fellow infosec R users who are trying to use our favorite language in their shops.

Enterprise Governance Social Engineering Pro-tip

If access to the AdviseR program is appealing, but you believe you might still have budgetary restrictions, highlight the “Exclusive Training Webinars from R Experts” component as a training budget item since those webinars are very informative and it should be pretty easy to get $800.00 approved in the training budget (most infosec courses are much more expensive and rarely give you a year’s worth of access to the training resources).