The passing away of a dear friend is not the sort of event that one anticipates as a trigger for rushing around dealing with issues in computing, contracts and obstinate cyber-security officials. I’m sorry to report that I’ve been through two episodes of these circumstances in 2022, and if there was ever a reason to bemoan the state of “support” in our industry, it’s in dealing with the death of a technically minded acquaintance.
I was initially put in mind of this subject by a rather more positive and light-hearted incident from a few years ago. A friend had reached the end of his patience with the upkeep of his own local email server, and started asking me about replacements. I had agreed that, at the time, the administrative burden of running your own email host was reaching something of a peak: after resisting for many years, I had caved in to the idea of a cloud-based email service. This suited his particular combination of high-importance, high-value messages which were at the same time small and terse, making him reluctant to shell out for a full-fat software suite, hardware to put it on and
