Comments on: Keeping IT Simple – Infrastructure Choices for the Small Business

By: Monica

Monica — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:03:11 +0000

You've made a very nice job here. thanks a lot. I agree with you that nowadays the economic climate hostile to small businesses. Everything is occupied by gigantic corporations. I've seen a film about it (found it at rapidshare SE http://rapidpedia.com ). I got very sad because of such tendency. Well, it is great that you show one of the aspects when small business can resist the pressure of gigantic and lobbistic corporations.

By: John R. Pattison

John R. Pattison — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:44:45 +0000

I noticed today that this blog post was picked up over at the SBS Diva Blog:

msmvps.com/.../keeping-it-simp

There were some interesting responses there (some of them surprisingly strong!). I'll cross-post my response to those comments here:

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There are some good points made above. Of course it is best to have a domain. Of course it is best to have client files on a server instead of a workstation. Of course it's nice to have automatic backups of workstations. Of course users SHOULDN'T be administrators. Of course users SHOULDN'T install malicious software on their computers... However... this is the real world...

The reality that there are a lot of small businesses out there on REALLY tight budgets. Some of these businesses need REALLY simple solutions that eliminate the risk of a problem happening that's going to cost them $2,000 to fix, or that isn't going to put them out of commission for a day to resolve.

Regarding users initiating backups... Users at companies such as this know that they need to keep their files on the server. Of course, the files there are protected by RAID and offsite backups. But the reality is that they'll always have SOME files on their local systems which need to be backed up. The users know what they're dealing with better than I do, and understand the risks they are taking in the choices they make. Additionally, it takes a full day sometimes to reload a user's software. In a service-based company such as an accounting firm, some of that lost revenue may affect the individual personally (in either time or money). So in a situation such as this, I don't see any problem putting some responsibility on the user, since they are the ones who will face the consequences. We're dealing with laptops here, which are taken with the user overnight, so we can't do things like schedule laptops, etc. And in reality, it is just so SIMPLE to kick off an image-level backup using the tools built in to Windows Vista.

We all would love to have perfect clients that will agree to do things exactly as we want them to, and will pay us for as much time as we need to make things perfect. Unfortunately, that's not always in line with the real world.

By: Bruce Berls

Bruce Berls — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:32:14 +0000

Nicely done! I work exclusively with 1-25 person businesses and this is a lovely summary of the choices available for them today. You didn't mention remote access, which SBS 2008 handles so brilliantly that it gets an extra few pounds on the scales even in an office that might use MOS instead of onsite Exchange. My guess is that the demand for remote access will keep increasing, especially later this year when our clients will be buying netbooks like crazy.

I'm weighing exactly these considerations for an office now. I'm going to ask them to read your writeup. Thanks!

Bruce Berls

http://www.bruceb.com/news