Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals
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@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
I can tell you that the Office 365 and G-Suite customers of mine are the ones we need to spend less time with them to configure or support them. They have had their outages but that is less than hosting their own Exchange or IMAP/POP Server in contrast. The custoemrs with internal Email Servers and File Servers require more management than Office 365 for sure as well.
What services are you seeing that are requiring more time? Zoho? Zimbra? I've directly compared those two against O365. They are definitely way less time to support.
Another telling thing is.... when we get brought customers with disasters, it's always O365. Sure, they are the majority of the market, and certainly the absolute "go to" for shops that don't evaluate needs and just go for whatever has the most markup, so that's a big factor. But we see zero need for the kinds of regular recovery from any other service. It's a unique market saving people from O365 problems.
Of course, compared to just hosting Exchange, I expect it to be better. But I think we all know that that's a bad comparison, using "Exchange is so bad, that this better management of Exchange looks acceptable" is really highlighting just had hard it is to find an example of something less problematic than O365.
Services that require more time and upkeep, Dovecot/Mail/Exim/PostFix, Zimbra, mDaemon, Kerio Connect, Zentyal, Open-Xchange, for sure it is a pain in the but to maintain as well. Zoho not so much since it is also a cloud hosted service so that is no on the picture. I am talking about something you need to manage, upkeep and setup everything to manage the customer. Is almost a monopoly where the customer is being hold hostage to your upkeep. Anything that is cloud managed the customer can do 95% of the things without intervention of outsider management.
The amount of customers that we have rescued for those types of systems is greater than anything else and that is just about email. I can tell stories of File servers, Self-Hosted Apache Servers and so forth.
Exchange is not bad, most of the issues we find have to do with Autodiscover, Backups, Logs filling and so forth but not the functionality.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
This might be out of the subject of the topic and can be forked if needed. However do you think running Windows XP is a security Risk? Do you think running Windows 7 is a security risk any longer? If the answer to both it also makes it the same for Office 2010 then with the end of life ending on 10/13/2020. That is 10 years of the software being supported.
Keep in mind that XP and 7 are out of support, the one by a really long time. Office 2010 is just getting there. So similar, but not quite the same.
Also, the risks of Office code in the user space, rather than OS code in the admin space, is quite a different risk level.
And remember "a risk" is never a correct way to compare. Of course it's "a risk", the question is "how much risk, and how does that impact the business." If we only considered "a risk", obviously both Windows and MS Office would have never gotten on the table in the first place as both are "riskier" than Ubuntu and LO. But clearly, not risky enough to be a problem, just riskier. So we can't use "a risk" to determine these things, or even "more risk", but it has to be "X amount of risk, and what's our risk aversion."
I know why I said it, in IT you also have to plan and what I am saying is that in 2 months I doubt the whole company will just switch to newer Office without a plan. IT is also about planning and managing those migrations process ahead of time and not waiting until the last minute to just do a change.
So are you using that the risk of Office code is different? Why do you think people need training to deal with Phishing emails? Human involvement in things makes it for 90%+ of the issues that happen be it ransomware, loss of data, hacking and so forth.
You cannot be a responsible IT person and not consider risks and just dismiss it because that is just a minimal issue or maybe the OS is worst whatever your cup of Joe is. However Windows, Mac OS and any Linux Flavor have their own risks so for me it is about mitigating considering both the usability and risks.
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@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
I can tell you that the Office 365 and G-Suite customers of mine are the ones we need to spend less time with them to configure or support them. They have had their outages but that is less than hosting their own Exchange or IMAP/POP Server in contrast. The custoemrs with internal Email Servers and File Servers require more management than Office 365 for sure as well.
What services are you seeing that are requiring more time? Zoho? Zimbra? I've directly compared those two against O365. They are definitely way less time to support.
Another telling thing is.... when we get brought customers with disasters, it's always O365. Sure, they are the majority of the market, and certainly the absolute "go to" for shops that don't evaluate needs and just go for whatever has the most markup, so that's a big factor. But we see zero need for the kinds of regular recovery from any other service. It's a unique market saving people from O365 problems.
Of course, compared to just hosting Exchange, I expect it to be better. But I think we all know that that's a bad comparison, using "Exchange is so bad, that this better management of Exchange looks acceptable" is really highlighting just had hard it is to find an example of something less problematic than O365.
I am talking about something you need to manage, upkeep and setup everything to manage the customer. Is almost a monopoly where the customer is being hold hostage to your upkeep.
Yes exactly.
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@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
IT is also about planning and managing those migrations process ahead of time and not waiting until the last minute to just do a change.
Very good point and a good lesson to remember.
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@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
So are you using that the risk of Office code is different? Why do you think people need training to deal with Phishing emails? Human involvement in things makes it for 90%+ of the issues that happen be it ransomware, loss of data, hacking and so forth.
The point being... an infection from Office is trivial compared to an infection of the OS. The degree to which damage can happen is different. It's still bad, but it's not the same level, unless IT has really messed up.
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@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
You cannot be a responsible IT person and not consider risks and just dismiss it because that is just a minimal issue or maybe the OS is worst whatever your cup of Joe is.
Isn't that the point that I just made? I specifically pointed out that you had to actually consider the risk, not just lump them all the same.
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@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
However Windows, Mac OS and any Linux Flavor have their own risks so for me it is about mitigating considering both the usability and risks.
See, this is what I mean. Everything has risks. Risk evaluation involves evaluating how big and common the risks are, what they are likely to do, what the impact is.
If you just say "there is risk", all risk evaluation is useless. IT has to evaluate and consider the risks. Just saying that you have to be afraid of everything because everything has risks and treating it all the same is the same as completely ignoring it. "When everything is a risk, nothing is a risk."
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@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
So are you using that the risk of Office code is different? Why do you think people need training to deal with Phishing emails? Human involvement in things makes it for 90%+ of the issues that happen be it ransomware, loss of data, hacking and so forth.
The point being... an infection from Office is trivial compared to an infection of the OS. The degree to which damage can happen is different. It's still bad, but it's not the same level, unless IT has really messed up.
But office infections go to the OS level, it is not merely an Office solely infection. The office suite is just a vector same as PDFs and so forth.
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@scottalanmiller Yes, but in your case the way it looked to me is that you would consider Office 2010 to be perfectly fine and very little risk in 2020. For me it is a big risk the fact to be so behind.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
@dbeato said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:
However Windows, Mac OS and any Linux Flavor have their own risks so for me it is about mitigating considering both the usability and risks.
See, this is what I mean. Everything has risks. Risk evaluation involves evaluating how big and common the risks are, what they are likely to do, what the impact is.
If you just say "there is risk", all risk evaluation is useless. IT has to evaluate and consider the risks. Just saying that you have to be afraid of everything because everything has risks and treating it all the same is the same as completely ignoring it. "When everything is a risk, nothing is a risk."
It is understand what you think but saying and doing are two different things. So yes, most things have risks and nothing is perfect but you action it on prevention and being proactive you do no leave it to chance.
