Is your IT setup still earning its keep?

Decisions made correctly in 2016 deserve to be checked against 2026. Three questions every Isle of Man business owner should be able to answer about their IT.

Around ten years ago, a lot of Isle of Man businesses made a perfectly good decision. They moved their desktops into a provider's datacentre. Log in from anywhere, no servers in the cupboard, someone else worries about backups and patching. In 2016 that solved real problems, and the people who sold it were right to sell it and the people who bought it were right to buy it.

I want to be clear about that up front, because this piece is not an argument that anyone got it wrong. It's an argument that the world moved, and that decisions made correctly in 2016 deserve to be checked against 2026.

What changed

Three things, mostly.

First, the applications left. The software those desktops were built to serve now largely runs in the browser. Accounts, documents, email, case management, job tracking: one by one they became services you reach over the internet. When that happens, the hosted desktop stops being where your software lives and becomes a corridor you walk through to get to it.

Second, the laptop grew up. A modern, properly managed laptop enrols itself out of the box, encrypts itself, patches itself, and can be rebuilt by the person holding it without a technician in the room. The management burden that hosted desktops were designed to remove has, to a large extent, been removed at the source.

Third, the connectivity assumption flipped. Hosted desktops usually arrive with a dedicated circuit to the provider's datacentre, because when your whole working day lives at the far end of one link, ordinary broadband was never going to be trusted with it. That circuit has a monthly rental, often data charges on top, and frequently sits inside the managed service invoice where nobody sees it as a separate decision. Meanwhile fibre broadband on the Island got good, and a fibre line with a mobile failover now carries most businesses' real traffic pattern, which is out to the internet, not into one building.

There's a resilience point hiding in there too. A dedicated circuit into a single datacentre is one road to one destination. If either has a bad morning, everyone sits still. A business working on modern endpoints and internet services degrades more gracefully, because there is no single corridor everything squeezes through.

Sometimes the answer is: keep it

Hosted desktops still fit some businesses well. If you run specialist software that genuinely needs to live on a server, if your regulator or your clients require your data to sit in a specific place, if your team works across shared machines where nothing should persist locally, the model can still be the right one. I have seen setups I would not touch, because they were doing exactly what that business needed.

That's rather the point. The answer isn't the same for everyone, which is why it deserves to be a question rather than a default.

Why the question doesn't get asked

Here's the awkward bit, and it's a structural observation, not a criticism of any provider. The company running your hosted environment earns its living from that environment. The circuit is often billed through them too. However honest and capable they are, and many are both, you are asking them to review a setup their own revenue depends on. No business does that well about itself. Mine included, which is why I'd never mark my own homework either.

So the review has to come from someone on the client's side of the table, with no stake in the answer. That's most of what independent IT direction is.

Three questions worth an afternoon

If you want to run the check yourself, start here. What does IT actually cost per person per month, once everything is unbundled, and what would the same seat cost done a modern way? When your systems last had a bad morning, what did the standing-still cost, and how many mornings like that have there been this year? And what connectivity are you paying for, what does it actually carry these days, and when does the contract renew?

That last date matters more than it looks. The right time to ask the architecture question is about six months before the circuit renews, while not re-signing is still on the table.

If the numbers come back and the setup earns its keep, you'll carry on with more confidence than you had before, and that's a good outcome. If they don't, you'll be glad you asked while the asking was cheap.

Either way, it's half a day's work to know. I'd rather every business on the Island asked it, whoever they ask.

← Writing · Andy Bridson