Software
Software installation configuration support and training
Virtualisation
Windows server
Windows desktop
Linux server
Microsoft 365 & office applications
Server operating systems for businesses generally fall into two camps, Microsoft Windows or Linux (or a combination of both), with macOS and proprietary Unix offerings serving a minority of the market.
Whilst Microsoft server may have the largest market share in the SME market, the majority of the largest corporations, government bodies and financial institutions in the world use Linux due its stability, scalability and security.
Linux and Windows servers happily co-exist and integrate seamlessly within any business network, and with Linux being open source and free, significant savings can be made in licence costs by deploying Linux servers instead of Windows servers where they are able to perform the required role. Linux is also lightweight with a much smaller footprint than Windows, so with a reduction in required hardware resources further savings can be made.
When it comes to server deployment, having a physical box per server is no longer necessary, or recommended, and virtualisation is the way forward.
By utilising VMware virtualisation we are able to install and configure multiple Microsoft or Linux servers on a single physical server, or a cluster of servers for redundancy and failover, which not only reduces your capital investment in physical hardware, but it also reduces your footprint and operating costs through lower power consumption and a reduction in floor or rack space requirements, and additionally it enables far greater disaster recovery opportunities leading to vastly improved business continuity.
We are equally at ease using virtualised cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, taking the worry out of hardware breakages and reducing your footprint even further, whilst enabling almost infinite scalability without any capital investment in additional hardware.
We have expertise in installing and configuring all versions of Microsoft server and desktop operating systems, and desktop office applications such as Microsoft 365, as well as other commercial desktop and productivity applications.
From a security aspect, unless it is absolutely essential or you specifically request us not to, we always reduce the attack surface of Windows servers by only installing the bare minimum core services, restricting internet access, and use Windows Admin Center or Powershell to manage them from a secure privileged access workstation, following the least privilege access principals.
If your budget doesn't run to the cost of Microsoft licencing, we also have expertise in installing and configuring Linux, particularly Ubuntu, and open source desktop and productivity applications, such as Libre Office to replace Microsoft Office, GIMP and Inkscape to replace Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, SOGo to replace Microsoft Exchange, and many more.
If you have an application, process or function that can be fulfilled in a Linux operating environment, be that as a server or client device, we can seamlessly integrate this with a Windows environment to save on Microsoft licence costs.
We also have expertise in installing and configuring TrueNAS (known as FreeNAS prior to version 12.0), which is a free open source software solution based on FreeBSD and the OpenZFS file system, enabling commodity hardware to be used as a highly resillient network storage device, with data integrity checking to prevent data loss and several different levels of RAID redundancy.
If you want to learn more about our software services, please get in touch for an initial no obligation chat.