Luckily in our academic research group we administer our own workstations and servers ourselves. Has downsides as well of course, but at least we can fix or cha

Luckily in our academic research group we administer our own workstations and servers ourselves. Has downsides as well of course, but at least we can fix or change anything we want hardware or software-wise. I can imagine it would be excruciating to explain our requirements to an external IT department and then go back and forth clarifying what we want, make them learn stuff they'd otherwise not need, convince them that we really need it, wait until they have time... The downside is that things are not "professionally set up" (we're computer scientists but not pro admins), but at least if there's a deadline and something isn't working, we'll surely fix it because we have skin in the game.