I am going to share a story with you from one of our customers. They are a mid-sized firm, with 100 employees, over half of which have desktops. Their IT Director wears many hats, and he has a staff of 3 employees (plus himself) to keep the technology up and running. To keep life simple, all team members are cross trained but with a primary focus on either applications/desktops, servers, or networking.

They originally bought anti virus from us, but changed to a different vendor who gave them a “better deal.” The reason the “deal”� was so good was that our competitor did not explain that the anti virus software that ran on the Exchange Server was for the server itself and not for the email coming in. That required a special anti virus extension that either our competitor was ignorant about or simply chose to describe vaguely as to get the sale.

I wish this story was the first time I had ever heard something like this. It is critical to know what you need based on your environment. But with 50 hour work weeks and many hats to wear, it is not always easy to stay on top of all the issues and changes that can impact your IT environment. In a perfect world you would know – in the real world you have to work with partners you can trust.