Over the years, and even today, uncertainty about “servers” commonly comes up when a city first approaches us for help. While servers usually aren’t used day-to-day by a typical city employee, it’s not uncommon for city managers, city clerks, police chiefs, and department heads to deal with servers and understand enough about them to run their operations. However, many city employees may not understand exactly what a server does, what it is, and how it’s different than an individual’s computer.
It’s probably more confusing when some IT people start telling them, “A server IS a computer, but…” Okay. It is a computer, but it’s completely different than a computer. Then what is it?
In this post, we define a server—a specialized computer—by what it does and how it’s different than a desktop or laptop computer used by an individual.
Your desktop computer isn’t created to host something like an accounting database for multiple city employees to access in an efficient, fast manner 24/7. Servers are built to perform, perform, perform. That’s why they are used to run complicated software and applications that run your computer network, deliver your email, and give employees access to accounting and financial software. Servers are incredibly powerful computers primarily meant to run important applications. They are not the kind of computer that an individual would use for individual tasks. Instead, servers usually sit in a designated room or a data center in a remote location where they are overseen and managed by IT professionals.
Without a server, each city employee would have to install software on their computer. That’s not efficient at all. Even at home, you probably don’t access most of your favorite applications from software you installed on your computer. Instead, you access data and applications over the internet from…somewhere. That “somewhere” is a server or servers. Servers host applications so that employees can all access the software from their individual computers. That way, you can install the software or application once on a server and then deploy it to individual computers instead of installing software on each computer—a time-consuming, inefficient, hard-to-manage process.
One common problem that cities experience is when data, files, and documents are spread across many employee computers—with no centralized place to access that information. Servers solve that problem. As a few examples:
Do you trust city employees to secure their individual computers? As wonderful as these employees are, they are not IT professionals. That’s why software patching often lapses on individual computers. Instead, servers are the place where security software and tools can be centralized, managed, pushed out to all users, and overseen by IT professionals.
Also, servers allow for centralized administration. For example:
Whether your servers are at your city, in a data center, or in the cloud, they are the specialized computers that help run your most important applications and software. If you need help managing your servers or exploring server options that work best for your applications, reach out to us today.
Original Date: 11/6/2019