The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software
Posted on 01. Jul, 2009 by Amit Jindal in Business, Hardware, Linux, Security, Servers, Windows
Yet another Microsoft Issue that is often hidden from those who purchase Microsoft only products and infrastructure. The TCO is not only upfront investment. It should also be lost productivity, time and money is cleaning someone else’s mess.
“Detractors of free software like to point out it’s not really ‘free,’ and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft’s products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was ‘a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting “consultancy support” to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft.’ To make the comparisons fair, isn’t it about time these often massive costs were included in TCO calculations?”
via Slashdot News Story | The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software.
It is much like buying a used luxury car. You pay less upfront, but the cost of maintenance could kill ya. Well its not exactly like that, overall if things don’t break, you could be lucky. But do you want to base business over the optimism that your employees won’t click the virus ridden email by mistake? Are you that gullible?
We are releasing Aquevix Small Business Server just to help SMBs in this aspect. Microsoft software for small businesses costs too much. Not only upfront but all the things that you need to go with it, like anti-virus, anti-spam, defragmentation tools, CAL licenses, Terminal Service Licenses, MS office licenses, VPN software licenses and the list goes on.
Aquevix Small Business Server is based off Linux and provides all these and many more features all integrated and ready to run in a single box. See: http://www.aquevix.com/sbs