Autonomic has provided us with highly professional, expert and bespoke IT support spanning hardware, software, and an overhaul of our operating system and security measures.
They understand our needs and priorities as a human rights organisation and have excelled at meeting them – from supporting our decision to use free software, to ensuring best practice with complex security and privacy needs.
They have found innovative solutions to every problem we gave them, and always make sure their expert advice is delivered in an accessible way.
We are delighted to work with them and cannot recommend their exceptional service highly enough.
– Silkie Carlo, director, Big Brother Watch
Big Brother Watch is a UK-based campaign group fighting against surveillance, censorship and other civil rights issues, particularly the use of facial recognition technology to monitor, categorise, and track citizens.
They approached us in May 2023 for system administration and tech support. We were already fans of their work, and given the near 1:1 overlap between our values and theirs, we enthusiastically took on the opportunity to work with them.
The organisation needed support for their fully open-source office workstations, which we were happy to provide, especially given the dominance of Windows as an enterprise desktop operating system in many sectors.
We carried out a security audit of their infrastructure and rebuilt their server from scratch using the latest software from Linux Terminal Server Project, which we previously were unaware of and were subsequently really impressed by.
Now Big Brother Watch has an office of desktop workstations that boot from a regularly updated Ubuntu LTS OS image from their on-premises server over the network.
Staff members and volunteers can access the access their files at any workstation using a simple but robust permissions model (e.g. some files only by a single user, some accessible by all staff, some by staff and volunteers). This system is fully interoperable with their in office Windows workstations using SAMBA.
We also ensured their OpenVPN based remote access capability was working properly, so staff can access their files from home when needed.
Services we provided:
- Full rebuild of office Ubuntu server
- Hardware procurement, repair and maintenance
- Remote Linux desktop support
- Occasional on-site support
- Remote access using OpenVPN
- Uptime monitoring of the office server and network
- Security audits of server
- Installing and configuring software upgrades
- Inventory of Big Brother Watch’s hardware, software, and subscription services.
- Nightly backups