In our case, there are a bunch of benefits and reasons:

• Active Directory (plus certificate services, but I don’t personally touch those at all)
• A lot of our software here in healthcare is legacy stuff that works on Windows and only on Windows
• My boss is used to Windows and is far too busy and old to want to learn something different
• Windows Server is generally okay and comes with some handy management features built-in

We do have some systems that are on Linux (Photon OS for VMware stuff, a couple of vendor-implemented Ubuntu systems). We don’t really have much to do with these system, though. I’m the only one here who’s familiar with *nix stuff, and while I’ve tried implementing stuff like our Intranet server on Ubuntu Server, I eventually moved over to Windows Server with IIS because it was just easier for my coworkers to access and use.

As for containerization, we have so many servers that do one thing and only one thing. Docker would be awesome, but it’s sadly just really not a thing in our slice of the healthcare and IT sector. We do plan to start moving to a hybrid cloud model with Azure, but that probably won’t be for a few years.