There are a lot of good reasons to outsource IT Ops but I've never seen the topic discussed in quite this way. Why WOULDN'T you want to outsource IT?
First of all, let's talk about the reasons Hosting companies tout for moving forward with outsourcing:
- You don't have to carry as many IT persons on your payroll,
- You don't have to maintain certifications and training levels for IT personnel,
- Around the clock eyes on the environment,
- You don't have to pay for real estate to maintain a server farm environment (nor pay for air conditioning and electricity for support environment)
Refuting those points:
- No you don't have to carry as many IT persons on your payroll, but you have to pay for the Hosting company's IT personnel.
- No, you don't have to maintain certifications and training levels for IT personnel, but you do have to pay for the Hosting company's personnel to maintain their certification levels.
- Around the clock monitoring, call-home and self-healing technologies can provide the around the clock eyes on your environment w/o undue load on your IT staff.
- You will be paying not only for the real estate for the server farm but also for the A/C and electricity to support them. Add in the cost of additional bandwidth necessary for your employees to work across your pipe to the Datacenter and these costs add up. While in a hosted environment, you can share the hardware costs with other environments, does that meet your regulatory requirements? Would that pass a regulatory audit?
It's critical for companies considering outsourcing to be aware of the terms in their contracts. What are you paying for? Are you paying for additional costs associated with upgrades or change management? Are you paying for electricity use above and beyond a specific threshold? Are you paying for hands-on support in the event of a hardware failure? Hosting companies are not in business to be philanthropic. They are making money. How? Virtualization, lights off utilities in the form of less electrical consumption during non-populated timelines, automation tools, low footprint server farms and yes, server and system consolidation. Are there build-out terms in the event your environment grows beyond your current needs? Is there cage space that can be guaranteed so that you don't have to move your entire environment and incur downtime?
Have you ever read a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or Operating Level Agreement (OLA) for a Hosting facility? Average SLA's are for four hour response time. It could be that your SLA is for eight hour response for less- critical systems with four hours being set up for your mission critical environments. That's not resolution time, that's response time. Are there Resolution time contract terms? There need to be. You can contract for ASAP response time but at what cost? Is the sum cost-prohibitive? Find out.
Now let's go back to those 210 reasons. In an in-house supported environment, I've never seen an Ops team wait four hours to respond to an incident. Generally, teams respond as soon as they receive alerts and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. This would generally lead to a 30 minute response time with less than an hour resolution time. 30 minutes versus 4 hours equates to a difference of 210 minutes in response between in-house support and a Hosted provider. While I'm not saying every Hosted provider is going to wait for four hours before responding to an incident, what is the inducement for them to do so? If it isn't in the contract, it doesn't matter that they have a great facility and really nice engineers. They are, as you should be, looking out for the bottom line.
In order to move to a hosted solution with support included, a company needs to have a stable environment. Are you applications problematic? Have you had consistent policies and procedures in place that easily translate to a hosted environment? Do you have experience with managing vendor relationships? All of these are questions that need to be addressed prior to signing off on outsourcing Ops.
How much revenue or missed opportunity does that 210 minutes represent to you? If you are in a regulated business, those 210 minutes could be costly in terms of fines. Either way, those 210 minutes are going to be paid for. The question is – are the 210 minutes worth the price?
