Group thinking and corporate marketing that perpetuates the perceived need for IT infrastructure is a killer to small companies. Recently we took a dramatic step at TechRanch. Many years ago, some IT professional convinced us that we needed a server to host our own email and store documents. It was the center of our network and carried multiple levels of security. It hosted our shared calendar. We are a four person operation.

Keeping this piece of equipment running was roughly a $500/month costs including server maintenance, software, updates and re-configurations. Insane. It became a product of multiple different people who worked on it as consultants from time to time - all with different ideas, backgrounds and expertise. A few months back we ripped it out, went with google mail (nice group calendar function), emailed documents back and forth when we needed to collaborate on work (it's amazing how little we need to access someone else's documents) and yanked out multiple levels of security. Now we do backup by dragging important files to a writable removable drive once a week.

We probably lost some protection but we gained up time, lowered costs and eliminated a lot of frustration.

I'm sick of the scare tactics being marketed by IT security firms, network companies and the general SW/HW industry. More importantly, I'm disappointed in myself for falling for this crap.