Video suggestion : choosing the right IT company, introducing open-source into the work environment

How does a company weed out good vs bad IT companies?

How does a person begin to introduce open-source and Linux into the work environment? All we utilize can run in Linux without issue, however the major pushback I get is “everyone knows windows how do we teach them to support linux?”

In my experience, if a company outsources ALL their IT, then they don’t care. If they have onsite admins then you would tend to design solutions to their skill sets if they need to be able to support it. If not, then it probably won’t be an issue if you use Linux based solutions.

If you are an admin at one of those companies and want to start using Linux, just put together a project plan and show potential savings/benefits. It isn’t that hard to get Linux support either. I have used RHEL for all my projects and their support is awesome. If they say no, go do it in your own lab and follow up.

One of the things we often suggest to clients create a dummy file with some random data and leave it there long enough for the backup cycle to complete. Delete said file and ask their outsourced IT company to restore it. As stupid simple as that sounds, it frequently does not go well for small business with a bad outsourced IT vendor.

As for Linux, business will use what is most efficient & cost effective to operate. It’s not really about Linux VS Windows anymore, it’s more about what business line applications they will be using.

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I am one of 2 for in house IT, we were only only recently established as a department. Without going to far into detail, we outsource our IT so no one person inside the company has access to all the data / can cause data breeches / exfiltrate data. We have pulled that back some since being established. Our server stack is roughly 10 years old and has a bad backup infrastructure. (hence needing upgrade) There are security holes that were not corrected along with many other issues.

Just about everything we run can be moved to a linux machine without issue, which to me is far easier to manage.

Im not looking for linux vs windows, I do get the need for windows, but linux was nearly immediately shot down for something as simple as network monitoring (try to find an NMS on windows…there aren’t many…)

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