It is a little concerning that a large proportion of the UK’s (and the wider worlds) small businesses are totally reliant on either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Those two companies in effect control the majority of small businesses IT. I’m not sure giving that amount of control to two companies is a good move.

Twenty years ago most small to medium sized businesses had their own server running Microsoft Small Business Server and Exchange, and were in control of their own IT systems. But now we have mostly outsourced our systems to the cloud, with 99% of us using either the Microsoft or Google offering.

What are the alternatives?

I guess the Swiss based company Proton could be an option with their suite of Proton products (ProtonMail, ProtonCalendar, ProtonDrive, ProtonPass, ProtonAuthenticator). And that could be matched up with an open source office suite such as LibreOffice.

And we could replace Windows and MacOS with Linux.

You raise a very interesting point Justin Thomas.

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