We’re killing off servers, one at a time

Yes people, one at a time, we’re slowly killing off servers.

We’ve been chipping away at this for a couple of years already, but even in the short time we’ve had in 2023, we’ve culled a good number of servers. They’ve been retired, never to have their spinny mechanical drives fired up again.

And, we’re not cheating and replacing this with a brand new box for everyone in the office to marvel at, and wonder what on earth it does. We shift the relevant services to a Cloud solution instead, which more often than not, centres around Office 365, and all things Microsoft Azure.

I can honestly say, running and maintaining servers used to keep me at night. Having a business solely rely on that one box in the corner of the office, is enough to give anyone a sleepless night.

Now don’t get me wrong, we as a business, still do support a small handful of servers, but we have plans for retiring all of them – which we’re slowly but surely working towards.

We had an enquiry come our way a couple of weeks ago, asking if we wanted to quote to take on support for a Windows 2003 Server. 2003! Support for this product ended, just seven years ago, yet there are businesses out there that are clinging on for dear life, using an antique. They’re just one bad sector away from a complete business meltdown. You have to move on people, you can’t just cling onto “the good old days” or say “that’s the way it’s always been”. It’s holding you back.

Every server we decommission, gives us a great sense of achievement, in that things are moving forward for both the customer and ourselves. On they go, to better things, which are easier, more reliable and more secure.

And, they’ll no doubt be other IT Businesses out there, thinking, what about all the lost revenue from keeping the disasters waiting to happen ticking over? Well, that’s super simple, if a business no longer exists because the old server they were reliant on fails, where does that leave your revenue? We’d rather have a customer for life, rather than just getting some extra pocket money until the server dies, along with the customer’s business.

So, we’ll keep plugging away, killing off one server at a time.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, an IT Support and Cloud Services business which have been server-less since the dawn of time.