Beware the mad scientist...

Beware of the mad scientist... A techie (or company) who peddles the hopes of saving a business a lot of money by offering a solution with either inferior hardware and/or recommending an open source software solution. By inferior hardware, I mean using hardware that does not suit a company's needs. In theory, a company with 50 users could use a PC with a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, as a Peer-to-Peer central file server, but this really would not be an adequate solution. The mantra that you should always be repeating when faced with the decision of implementing a new IT solution is "you get what you pay for". How often does that simple phrase come back to haunt the unfortunate company that decides not to heed its simple warning? You will always, and I mean always, pay more in the long run for these home grown solutions. Whether it be during the installation, where a techie will be paid hourly to work out all of the bugs and tweak their solution for your specific environment, or for the long term woes that come from the lack of support with the eventual home-grown solution. This will also include the loss of money which often results from the lack of user productivity, not to mention the complaints and hit in employee confidence you will soon encounter by taking the low road.

I've seen certain situations arise when a company is faced with the decision of implementing a new IT solution (such as a firewall, router, or VPN solution) and hoping to reuse old PC hardware in the process. Before you know it, you have a home-grown system that only a handful of people (who are hard to come by and not cheap) can support. This doesn't mean that the less costly solutions are always the wrong choice. I often incorporate many free (or very inexpensive) solutions with my client sites, but never in an area which can adversely effect business operations. For example, you can use a solution like LogMeIn for remote control access, and forgo the installation of a dedicated VPN / Terminal Server solution when only a few people in a company need remote control access to their work system or environment. I also recommended a short while ago that one of my clients use the FTP server solution that's included with the Windows XP Professional operating system. After assessing their needs, I went over the limitations with using the free solution (which they were ok with), and they are still using that FTP server setup today. They did forego some functionality that would come with a more robust and expensive FTP server solution, but they were educated on the shortcomings, and most importantly, were content with the end result.

Just remember that you get what you pay for. Make the right decision and put your money in your IT infrastructure (PCs, servers, switches, routers, firewalls, etc.), and not in to the pockets of the mad scientist knocking on your door. Take the path less traveled, doesn't apply here. Work with known IT solutions when it comes to critical business operations.