So, why me? What makes me qualified to give advice and share experiences on this? Here's a little background information - I am the Director of an IT department for a medium size non-profit multi-national organization which specializes in children's educational software. My budget is typically less than 5% of the revenue the company brings in. That covers all hardware, software, Internet services, network equipment, data storage (over 40TB), maintenance and similar for the main office (roughly 75 production people - artists, programmers, designers, audio, video & customer support) as well as four foreign offices.
To cover all of this on a pretty small budget, we have to find creative ways of doing more with less. I've been doing this for twelve years with my current employer and gotten pretty good at it. Good enough, that I have a Class III data center with a pretty fast Internet pipe, a three tier development framework serving customer and employees 24/7 with a record of 99.99 uptime over the last several years. Looking back on it, it's actually quite impressive and yet we (my staff and I) haven't broken the bank.
Look for future posts and how I've been able to do this. Comments and questions are welcome especially if there are specific topics you want to know about.
Disclaimer: there's lots of ways of doing things and I don't pretend for a second that my way is the right way. Take it for what it's worth and if it helps someone out, then I'll consider this a success.
The Frugal IT Guy.
