Forget About IT^® –
Building a hybrid cloud solution

Forget About IT is a product range of rented hybrid-cloud solutions developed by Supporting Role years before Cloud became a buzzword. The main drive behind the concept was a requirement by a number of our smaller clients to have their own local file server without the expense of buying and managing something like a Microsoft Small Business Server or a Novell  Netware server.

Using Linux we developed the idea to rent our clients a fully managed file and email server fit for a small business, all in the days before broadband as we know it now. Some clients used an analogue modem to download emails on a regular basis, some had ISDN2 with a router that checked every time the local network connected to the Internet.

By late 2004 the concept had been developed into a viable product an in 2005 was launched as a standalone company and product range.

Backups were done via tape, and when broadband became more commonly available in 2006, we migrated to an online backup system using an in-house developed intelligent client-server backup system.

Using centralised configuration tools we were able to reduce the overheads of managing  large numbers of servers. At the point of writing this in 2017 we have rolled out over 200 servers, many of which are still in daily use.

Many of the tools we use have been developed in-house and we have built up an extension knowledge base of Linux system configuration and maintenance covering database servers, email servers, file servers, calendaring servers and address book systems, as well as authentications systems, firewalls and systems integration.