When we meet up with out prospective clients, we listen to them describe the IT problems that they face. It ranges from lousy hardware, lousy software, network problems or poor after sales service (this being the majority of all the problems). We then go on to enquire about the current network system being used in their office and then we realized that many a time, they do not have a clear understanding of their IT system themselves. And I do not blame them. This is because some of these companies have a very complicated IT setup that sometimes even I have a problem understanding. When they draw diagrams depicting their network, many questions keep popping up in my head like, Why is this even here? What is the function of this server? Why is this connected like that? The way in which some of the networks are planned are so poor that it convinces me that it is done so only to annoy the technicians employed to do maintenance on the system.
When we then go on to recommend the changes we are going to make, they go into a state of shock and doubt, because they feel that our recommendations are too simple and fall short of their expectation of revamping the whole system, which often is unnecessary. Customers need to understand that the more complex the system is, the more areas where system errors can occur. They must try to keep their system as simple as possible to weed out all the possibilities of all these errors/failures. What I mean by simple is to get hardware/software that specifically only do what you want to do with it. If you want to host an application, get an app server that does that. If you just need a file server, get a NAS that do just that.
By simplifying your system to the bare minimum that does only what you want it to do, you are effectively reducing all the potential problems that you are going to face; Remember prevention is better than cure.
We provide simple solutions that works. Many of our current clients can stand testament to that. We feel that many other companies need to embrace this minimalist approach to IT systems. It is simple only when you make it so.
By Chris
