Small Business Services

Many businesses are looking to Linux as a strategic platform because it's vendor agnostic, low cost, is targeted by tens of thousands of software packages, and has a huge set of enthusiastic users who understand the Linux ecosystem. That last point is key. If you are seeing strategic roles for Linux in your organization, but are staying clear simply because of a lack of in-house expertise, it might be better to hire in someone, either part time or contractually to start, to provide that initial knowledge base.

Like any advanced or complex technology, Linux can be useful immediately, but it'll take you years to master it. Any Windows admin will tell you the same about their platform. While on the face of it that sounds like a good reason to stick to a single platform, the fact is that all platforms have strong and weak points which can dramatically affect your business. That's why almost all medium to large environments are heterogeneous, with Linux, Windows, and Solaris eating up the lion's share. As the size of the environment increases, the proportion of *nix hosts to Windows hosts tends to increase sharply.

Unless funding is very tight, these shops don't generally try to start from zero knowledge base and figure it out, they hire in the expertise necessary to run the technology. The reason is that, when you're just learning, you make a lot of bad design decisions because you don't really understand the technology. By bringing in someone with 10 years of experience, you can benefit immediately and go through far fewer growing pains. If this person is a consultant, you can stipulate in the contract that one of their duties is to train your employees over the course of the contract. This way you build up that in-house knowledge without having to design the systems while you do it.

If funding is really tight, then the advisable thing to do is to start small. Set up a departmental Linux web server using Drupal or database server with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or Sybase, which only you and your team use. Have everyone share the administration responsibilities, and document the heck out of it. You'll learn a lot as you work with the platform, and will become far more comfortable with it in the process. As you learn the administration and development techniques, you'll probably feel confident enough to start using it for increasingly important production purposes.