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Our company is a B2B importer of building products with 11 staff (remote and on-site) and growing. If we were to rebuild our IT infrastructure from ground up, what would be a recommended Small Office IT Infrastructure setup?

This is a simplistic question, so here’s some points.
Reason for my question;

  • I’m the go-to guy for our company IT, but have no formal training or background in IT. Keep responses simple please!!

  • Through necessity and research I have gained a little experience and can fix most issues that arise.

  • I can’t seem to find any decent resources on how to setup a small office IT infrastructure. (Can anyone direct me to a good up-to-date resource?)

  • Our current IT Infrastructure is currently OK, but has grown to be a bit of a beast, and administrating the disparate components is getting harder and is obviously leading to more issues.

  • We are growing, so I’m looking to the next 1-5 years, and it’s just not gonna work for us.

What we don’t need.

  • No email or file server needed. We use Office365 for emails, file storage, IM and Video Calls (Teams) and sharepoint for collaboration.

  • Our ERP system is hosted on the cloud, so no database or server required for this.

  • Workstations. We have Windows 10 Pro machines a-plenty

What we do need

  • Administrate users/domains/workstations (MS Server? Azure AD? Virtualization?)

  • I’d love to include Spiceworks :slight_smile:

  • A centralized backup strategy and software for backing up;

    • Workstations

    • Server/NAS

    • Office365 (emails, files, sharepoint etc.)

    • Both local and offsite backups required. (MS Server? NAS? Azure? S3? B2?)

  • Documentation of IT system.

I trust I have given enough information. and I’d appreciate any responses, and will respond to any of your questions. If anyone knows some good documentation, please let me know.

4 Spice ups
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Synology NAS. This is an amazing little box. Basically, use the cloud for everything, but this is your on-site infrastructure.

1 Spice up
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As above Azure AD can be used for 99% of what you need particularly seeing as you are running Win 10 Pro which means your on site estate will be near non existent. Also as you are on Office 365 all your accounts are already in AAD for you

Do you 100% need to back up endpoints? If so I know Veeam does endpoint backup which I believe is part of their free edition? (I don’t use Veeam so aren’t 100% sure).

However as you have Onedrive for business is it not possible to tell your users anything they want to backup put in their OneDrive anything else if their computer goes down then they lose it? (that’s our rule, if it’s important put it on the network or in OneDrive, if its not there and your computer fails then that’s all on you)

2 Spice ups
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you use O365 so everything is back up. just tell your users to save their files in the OneDrive folder.

Veeam does have endpoint backups but that’s adding unnecessary headache. keep your files in O365.

1 Spice up
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To decrease any headaches as you grow, aim for a cornfield view not a city scape… In other words, standardize everything. Part of the headache of IT is when you have 10 different ways of doing 1 thing. 1 IM program, 1 email program, etc…

For desktops, you want to be able to swap out computers easily and minimize the impact to your users. This also allows you to have a 1 spare computer that you can use to quickly get a person back up and running while you have their busted one fixed.

Part of the headache of IT is when you have 10 different ways of doing 1 thing.

3 Spice ups
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Awesome, thanks. I have just had a look at this and agree this would simplify everything. Appreciate your advice!

@Synology

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Part of the headache of IT is when you have 10 different ways of doing 1 thing.

Thanks Zimm001, great advice.

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Thanks badbanana & @kareembadr4040 for the advice about not needing endpoint backup. I see the logic here. I guess the need is to drill it into all users that they need to store their docs in OneDrive. Maybe I could redirect their Desktop and MyDocuments folders to Onedrive.

@christaylor2912 @rinomardo2

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User education is key, the more you can get them to look after themselves on the basics the more time you have to spend on the important matters

I have seen a thread somewhere before about someone who did something like that before with profiles in OneDrive as well:

Set up one drive

Move folders you want to put into OneDrive folder and replace with Symlinks to the folders in question

There might be a more elegant solution but that would definitely work.

1 Spice up
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Virtualization is a great step in getting things consolidated, but you want to make sure your environment would be a good fit. Since you’re just starting out, you don’t want to start virtualizing everything. If you plan on using cloud services like Office 365 and Azure for your file server, email server, ERP system, Active Directory, etc., then it doesn’t seem like you’ll have too many workloads hosted on-prem. If you have no on-prem servers, then virtualization wouldn’t be necessary :slight_smile: For server virtualization, VMware does have a free option for hypervisors - the vSphere hypervisor - and you can use ESXi with free vSphere to create and provision your own virtual machines quickly.

Unrelated - There’s a good rule of thumb with backups: the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data, in 2 different forms of media, and 1 backup should be located offsite. Just a thought as you look into the different hardware/software you need :slight_smile:

Best of luck in your transition and let me know how VMware can help!

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OneDrive can now automatically sync and backup users desktops and my documents. Just enable the setting.

2 Spice ups
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Since my first piece of advice is put email, fileas and line of business in the cloud, you are most of the way there. On the workstation side, some sort of AD, either Azure, or Jumpcloud would give you management and centralized authentication. At that point backup can be handled with OneDrive, as mentioned and if necessary there are 3rd party products for backing up Office 365.

1 Spice up