IT Ops
IT operations and AI workflows
Service desks, endpoint and workflow automation, and where an enterprise AI deployment pays for itself.
Openreach sets January 31, 2027 for the PSTN switch-off
Openreach retires the legacy phone network on January 31, 2027 and says the date will not move. Businesses still running alarm lines, POS terminals and out-of-band modems have one quarter to migrate.
Windows 10 ESU vs a hardware refresh: the per-device maths for 1,000 PCs
Windows 10 support ended on 14 October 2025 and ESU runs only to 12 October 2027. Microsoft has published no per-device ESU price on its lifecycle pages, so the refresh decision turns on device age and the two-year ceiling.
GitHub Actions vs GitLab CI: what 200,000 build minutes a month costs
Both plans include a monthly minute quota and bill overage per runner size. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000 minutes; GitLab Premium is $12 and Ultimate $24 per user per month. Self-hosted runners are free on GitHub.
Intune vs Tanium vs Automox: the cost of patching 2,000 endpoints on a schedule
Intune is bundled into Microsoft 365 plans and manages Windows, macOS, iOS and Android from one console. Tanium and Automox publish no per-device rate, so the 2,000-seat comparison turns on what you already licence and what you ask both vendors to quote.
Veeam vs Rubrik vs Cohesity: ransomware-proof backup for 500 to 2,000 seats
Veeam publishes a per-terabyte price for its cloud vault and documents a Linux hardened repository; Rubrik and Cohesity publish neither a list price nor a restore figure. Immutability is table stakes, and the separate vault is the real split.
A 5 TB a day observability bill is a parsing decision, not a volume problem
At Grafana Cloud's published log rates, 5 TB a day costs about 82,500 dollars a month before volume discounts, and 91 per cent of that sits in two lines. A collector pipeline is where the number moves.
Microsoft closes the last bundled VMware route on 31 October
Microsoft stops selling licence-included Azure VMware Solution on 31 October 2026 and wants customers on a VCF bring-your-own-licence by 30 August 2027. Proxmox's per-socket price is the number that changes the maths.
OpenTofu 1.13 is supported to August 2027; your state file decides the switch
OpenTofu 1.13.0 shipped on 29 September 2026 with security support to August 2027. The migration reverses in four commands, but the project's FAQ caps state-file compatibility at Terraform 1.5.x.
Windows Server 2016 ends on 12 January 2027 with no published ESU price
Extended support stops on 12 January 2027. Microsoft will sell three more years of patches through Azure Arc, but the per-core price is quote-only and Software Assurance is still the gate.
PagerDuty vs Opsgenie: what on-call coverage costs per responder
Opsgenie stopped selling on 4 June 2025 and shuts off on 5 April 2027, so the choice is now PagerDuty or Atlassian's Jira Service Management. PagerDuty's per-user tiers and its $2,800 to $48,000 annual plans set the responder count where each wins.
CentOS is gone: what moving 300 servers to RHEL, Rocky or Ubuntu costs
The migration cost is engineer hours per host plus the subscription tier: price 300 servers across the three destinations, include the support contract, and give the host count where the paid distribution is cheaper than the rebuild.
ServiceNow vs Jira Service Management vs Freshservice: what an ITSM seat buys at 300 agents
Freshservice publishes three per-agent tiers at $19, $49 and $99 billed annually, with AI agents and Copilot assistants only on the top tier. At 300 agents the tier you land on, not the vendor, sets the bill.
AVD vs Citrix vs Omnissa Horizon: the per-user cost after the Broadcom repricing
Desktop virtualisation pricing per user changed with the Citrix and VMware licence moves. Azure Virtual Desktop publishes its per-user rates; Citrix and Omnissa do not, so the comparison turns on what each vendor will quote at 250 and 1,000 users.
What enterprise LLM inference really costs: open weights against the API
Hosted APIs bill per million tokens and scale with use; self-hosted open weights bill per GPU-hour and scale with time. The crossover is utilisation, and the costs that decide it are rarely the ones on the invoice.
Shadow AI policy: what it must say, and why a blocklist fails
A blocklist pushes AI use onto personal accounts and personal devices, where the same data leaves with no logging and no contract. A workable policy names approved tools, a data rule, a disclosure rule and an owner.
Enterprise AI workflow automation: pricing, RPA limits and governance
Workato, Zapier Enterprise, UiPath, Power Automate and self-hosted n8n meter automation in tasks, runs and executions. Where the bill jumps at scale, what a security review asks for, and which processes still need screen-level RPA.
ITSM automation: what to automate first, and what the wrong tier costs
Classification and catalogue fulfilment pay back first, but only after the catalogue, the asset list and the identity provider are accurate. Jira Service Management's published rates show what choosing the wrong edition adds to the bill.
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