If you rely on computers or digital technology to operate or track your business, then you need some degree of IT service. IT is equally about a) preventing disaster and b) keeping things running smoothly. Both aspects of IT should attempt to be as invisible as possible to the end-user (see item 'b'). The inherent invisibility of good IT service can give people a distorted sense of the amount of work it takes to maintain good IT infrastructure and to undervalue its importance.This is especially true if they've never experienced a catastrophic loss of data or service—or if they're already conditioned to having sub-par IT performance in their business.

Here are some symptoms that your business might need IT services:

• Security problems and issues.
• Unresolved software bugs (i.e. things that are broken and that you've learned to put up with).
• Lost and/or corrupted data (e.g. lost and unrecoverable files—due to a lack of proper backups).
• Unreliable software services (e.g. email problems, file servers problems, database problems, etc.).
• One you wont know your missing until you have it: time- and labor-saving tools, processes, and optimizations that can help your business run more smoothly.

That's a good question! The short answer is, a long campaign of aggressive marketing by proprietary software companies. You may have heard some of their anti-open-source talking points, like:

• Quality software is expensive, and requires frequent costly upgrades to stay up-to-date.
• Conversely, free software is unreliable and difficult to use—i.e. there's no such thing as a free lunch (why else would it be free?)

And some of the point's often used to justify the steep cost of their often buggy software:

• It's the nature of software to crash and fail over time.
• It's the nature of software to be confusing and difficult—and if you have a problem with a software application it's probably your fault.
• Good software requires the latest hardware—and that must be purchased every few years to keep your software running optimally.

Actually, none of this is true. What is true is that a lot of companies stumbled upon a massive gravy train 20 years ago. They took the old business model for manufacturing durable goods and applied it to software, where—unlike real manufacturing—the only cost was development. Once a software product was developed it could be digitally duplicated endlessly, at almost no cost. It took some slight-of-hand to sell consumers on the idea that this was the same as manufacturing a physical product—and thus to justify the retail cost of the software. Hence the marketing to convince people of the 'value' of what was being sold.