IT Sectors

[Yosh1]

Hi everyone,

 

 I have a computer repair business supporting domestic and small businesses (been in the industry 15 years now).

 

A question for those in the IT industry, do you try to learn/expand your knowledge across as many areas as possible or stick to a specific sector?

 

Recently i'm getting a few businesses who are running ADDS (Active Directory Domain Services/Server2019). Quite bluntly i've done nothing to do with ADDS or Server software over 15 years (Not sure how long or hard it is too learn?). I only support offices/clients with upto 10 desktop computers. Most small businesses I deal with are using NAS drives or cloud file storage. 

 

With it being my business i'm not to sure if I should expand into those areas (to diversify) or leave it for maybe a larger IT support company. I'm aware some larger companies have staff specifically for Servers, a few who do CCTV etc. With IT there are so many areas and you can't possibly cover it all. 

[tkitch]

it's all up to you:

More Skills = more potential future income

 

You could also leverage those skills towards helping your clients with intelligent upgrades. 

Ex:  AD adds security and other things that local accounts lack.  Even at some relatively small companies it can be a very good idea.  (But at low-scale, Azure would probably be the go-to, skipping a local server)

 

What do you want to do?  Figure that out and make decisions from there.

[Electronics Wizardy]

As far as the AD stuff, unless you can get a lot of business from it now I'd skip it. Azure AD and other cloud management solutions seems like there being pushed pretty hard from Microsoft and others. While AD hasn't gone EOL, they also haven't added much features wise to it recently and are trying to push them to the cloud. If I was doing a new managed desktop setup I'd probably go cloud managed. 

[Yosh1]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

As far as the AD stuff, unless you can get a lot of business from it now I'd skip it. Azure AD and other cloud management solutions seems like there being pushed pretty hard from Microsoft and others. While AD hasn't gone EOL, they also haven't added much features wise to it recently and are trying to push them to the cloud. If I was doing a new managed desktop setup I'd probably go cloud managed. 

 

Cheers

 

That's the trouble, a client is always bound to have something in place that i'm not too familiar with. It's not worth spending hours learning a certain technology when I come across it so rarely. 

 

Will look into Azure AD license fees. One issue I find is quite a few of my clients don't want to be paying monthly fees when they can buy a NAS for example and back that upto the cloud (onedrive for example)

[manikyath]

1 hour ago, Yosh1 said:

 

A question for those in the IT industry, do you try to learn/expand your knowledge across as many areas as possible or stick to a specific sector?

there's merit to both choices.

 

- if you diversify, you'll always find a customer base, because you can do a bit of everything. but you'll have to rely on external people for the advances stuff, because you cant diversify *and* drill deep on topics while also still being able to sleep.

 

- if you focus to a specific thing, you'll become before mentioned external specialist.. but you'll have to send away customers that want something you're not able to do.

 

i've worked for a business on both extremes..

 

- i've woked for 6 years for a company that tried to be everything to everyone, but they very much were *not* ready for office365 to be the de-facto standard, and ever since then they've been hit and miss, with the employees having to glue together the rubble of management mistakes.

 

- given before mentioned situation i jumped ship to a very M365 oriented business, they did all M365, but only M365.. their financials are great, they did a lot of successful projects.. but if a customer asked something that was just barely outside their scope, that smooth machine crumbled down hard and fast.

 

i'll also give two examples of people who have been very successful in their field.

 

- Level1Techs is <essentially> an accidential side-gig of Wendell Wilson Consulting, Wendell has made his career out of fixing people's IT problems, whatever that problem is.

- Tron guy.. of all people.. is actually a brilliant IBM mainframe engineer. he's *the* person to call if you have a problem with your IBM mainframe.

 

if you're up for a bit of dry matter between the both of them, here's a good watch:

[StarsMars]

1 hour ago, Yosh1 said:

Hi everyone,

 

 I have a computer repair business supporting domestic and small businesses (been in the industry 15 years now).

 

A question for those in the IT industry, do you try to learn/expand your knowledge across as many areas as possible or stick to a specific sector?

 

Recently i'm getting a few businesses who are running ADDS (Active Directory Domain Services/Server2019). Quite bluntly i've done nothing to do with ADDS or Server software over 15 years (Not sure how long or hard it is too learn?). I only support offices/clients with upto 10 desktop computers. Most small businesses I deal with are using NAS drives or cloud file storage. 

 

With it being my business i'm not to sure if I should expand into those areas (to diversify) or leave it for maybe a larger IT support company. I'm aware some larger companies have staff specifically for Servers, a few who do CCTV etc. With IT there are so many areas and you can't possibly cover it all. 

You could significantly expand your business if you get into active directory, it's the bread and butter of most businesses. But that's beyond the scope of a pc repair shop and more in line with an IT support company or managed service provider.

 

It can't hurt to set up a small domain in your shop and poke around. I say go for it.

[Yosh1]

1 hour ago, StarsMars said:

You could significantly expand your business if you get into active directory, it's the bread and butter of most businesses. But that's beyond the scope of a pc repair shop and more in line with an IT support company or managed service provider.

 

It can't hurt to set up a small domain in your shop and poke around. I say go for it.

Thank you for the replies. 

 

Have installed Server 2019 on a virtual machine to have a play about 

 

I am more of a repair service at the minute doing on-site visits etc but I know with business IT support there tends to be more repeat (offices having 3-10 machines for example). 

 

I've had one potential client come to me who are running server 2019 with a program which keeps hold of patient records. There is the software company also who do things remotely as far as the software is concerned. 

 

Other files (documents etc) they are wanting to use on the cloud and not actually use the server going forward. I paid them a visit to assess there setup and mentioned the server. They have 11 computers which appear to be connected to the domain.

 

Their previous IT support company did bits of work themselves whilst working with the patient record software provider who looked after their specialist software remotely.

[undergroundbeef]

I think it depends on which direction you want to take the business, and if you see any trends with clients.

 

If you like the smaller shops and want to keep the small shops, some of these things might be of limited value and your time could be better spent elsewhere. However, if you are seeing a trend where smaller shops are starting to use ADDS to better managing their current systems, and prepare for future growth, then it might be worth your time.

 

The other question would be, will your client's small shops likely stay small? If one starts to grow, would you intend to grow with it or hand them off? If handing them off, you don't need to worry too much, but if you are looking to grow with them, you'll want to have some idea of what technologies are needed to help scale, and put some things in place to make that easy on yourself, if a company looks like it might be headed in that direction. 

 

Where I'm at, everything is at scale, but you might want to have some thresholds in mind. Maybe Model A works for companies from 1-5 employees, but then starts to get messy, so you transfer them to Model B to handle 6-15 employees, and so on. These numbers are made up, but I think it illustrates the point. All these tools exist to help mange things at different scales, so having an idea of what tools you need at which level, and knowing which pools you plan to swim in, can really help clarify the technologies you'll want to invest in. I assume there is also licensing costs, so that also comes into play... at what point is a company willing to invest more in their tech to make their life easier? Those are things I'm guessing you have a decent idea about based on your work with the various clients you have.

 

I'm always of the opinion that things should be kept as simple as possible, so I wouldn't introduce complexity just for the sake of adding it, but if you are seeing a breakdown in your current systems, or they are becoming too much work to mange, it's time to start looking for solutions. Be very careful to make sure the solution isn't worse than the problem it's trying to solve.

[Lurking]

There is liability and your reputation. Only expand services if you are really good at that and can provide the reliability a business is paying for. 

 

I have no clue what it requires what you propose. But it sounds like you are at the beginning of a learning curve. If I had a business hiring IT services, I'd want 100% reliability and availability (or as close as possible). 

[wasab]

I would rather be expert in a specific area than to expand into more and more areas because it becomes increasingly difficult to become a master in one of them. 

Don't be a jack of all trades and master of none. Be a jack of some trades and a master in at least one. 

 

If you are talking about bussiness, do you have what it takes to compete with those already doing it for years? You see, besides technology and industrialization, the 2nd greatest contributor to human productivity and economic wealth is specialization, humans who can do one thing very well and only do that one thing and then trading that thing for other things that other humans do very well and who also only do that specific thing. 

[cmndr]

I'm IT adjacent. 

My take is that the cloud is eating up a lot of traditional IT work. Active directory is better done over the web in many cases. Similar story with things like certain network management and file storage. $1000 a month of subscriptions ends up cheaper than paying an extra $5000+ for staff members. 

And the then there's the fact that hardware just keeps getting cheaper. It's not worth spending $300 to troubleshoot a PC that costs $300 to replace. I can buy a half decent miniPC for $300. And that $300 miniPC has a longer useful life (and probably higher reliability) than a $10,000 (inflation adjusted) unit from the early 1990s. 

You'll get a similar story for a lot of other things... The need to run ethernet to every desk is getting reduced - WiFi 7 is pretty solid. I'm at the point where I only care about hard wiring my NAS and desktop and not much else. And I'm an enthusiast. 

There's value in supporting corporations but I suspect that much of it comes from software engineering and architecting infrastructure. 

I'd strongly consider branching out and branch into things that are relatively hard to absorb into cloud/automation.