To steal a line from the Bard, the question is not “to be or not to be” but “to outsource or not to outsource.” That’s how Shakespeare would have said it if he ran a modern data center, where time is precious, and even the best teams are strained.Maybe that’s what makes an IT service attractive. It can be cheaper and faster, begun with nothing more than a phone call and a meeting. But it’s not without risk.
When you outsource a key function—from network management to disaster recovery to simply cleaning the plenum—you bring unknown people into your office or send your data outside its walls, which is always a concern. And there's the age-old question of quality: Will you get what you pay for? If something breaks, will they fix it? If so, when?
By The Numbers If you're thinking of using an outside service, you're not alone, not by a long shot. Plunkett Research estimates that global revenue from outsourcing will hit $400 billion by year's end. The National Association of Software and Service Companies estimates that India reaped $16.5 billion in IT service and software exports this year, and consulting firm McKinsey (mckinsey.com) estimates that China earned $6.8 billion in BPO (business process outsourcing) and offshored IT service last year alone.
In a recent report, research firm Computer Economics, which tracks IT services, found growth in all of them. The most popular? Software development, then Web sites/ ecommerce, hosted apps, and disaster recovery. Over half the companies it studied outsourced these functions in whole or in part. Roughly a third outsourced data center operations, but it was the slowest of any service tracked.
Backing Up Data There are times when farming out an IT function makes sense. Doug Bruhnke of DataPreserve (www.datapreserve.com), which provides offsite backup to small companies, says that outsourced service lets companies focus on what really matters. “From a small and medium-sized business perspective, people are so busy just working on their own business—and that’s what they’re good at—that at this point I don’t think it makes any sense to have insourcing for IT anymore,” he says.
The exception? Companies that have the luxury of throwing dozens or even hundreds of man-hours at every IT problem they face. “The cases where it would make sense,” says Bruhnke, “are when you’ve reached some critical size . . . and you’ve got some technology or information you might want to shield from outside.”
Indeed, sending your data to third parties for backup may worry some, but it’s not without benefits. The first is the cost: A backup service can be far cheaper than building a hardened remote site, ready on demand 24/7/365.
“In addition to being more affordable,” says Bruhnke, “it would be a lot more secure. We’ll run into cases where people are backing up to someone’s garage or an unencrypted situation where data is passing over the Internet unencrypted.”
But dollars and safety aside, the biggest benefit to outsourced backup, says Bruhnke, might be peace of mind. “It’s a don’t-have-to-worry-about-it type solution,” he says.
Running The Network It’s one thing to outsource your backups, quite another to outsource your network. Yet no small number of companies choose a network management service to run their LANs, WANs, VPNs, Web sites, or back-office apps.
Why? Cost is one factor, of course. Companies such as NIT (www.nitconnect.net), Inforonics (www.inforonics.com), and External iT (www.externalit.com) claim to save big bucks. Hosting servers in a third party’s data center can mean a windfall of savings on racks, ingress and egress controls, fire suppression, and more.
But as always, trust issues prevail, made worse by the penalties that HIPAA, Sarbox, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley impose for a data control or privacy breach. Out-sourcing a portion of your precious network means trusting a vendor completely, not only with service levels but with the measures it takes to prevent everything from malware to malicious inside abuse. Thus some companies choose a blended approach, with a vendor controlling a portion of daily operations (say, ecommerce or Oracle apps) under the watchful eye of in-house staff.
Cleaning Up One field where a service is easy to swallow is data center cleaning. After all, how many IT managers like to do windows—or plenums, or a little rack scrubbing?
Experts in data center cleaning, such as Premier Solutions Company (www.premiersolutionsco.com), DataClean (www.dataclean.com), and Sterile Environment Technologies (www.set3.com), can manage advanced problems too, including zinc remediation, toxins, or dust in delicate servers. And they can do it far better than in-house staff, with special equipment that few SMEs have.
The bottom line? Backups, Web hosting, network management, cleaning, software design, help desks—you can outsource every part of your data center, floor to ceiling. You can turn over every task, using the power of your wallet and not just your in-house labor to keep things in order.
But how you do it, not to mention the cocktail of vendors and options you choose, is unique to each data center.
by David Garrett
| Sample Vendors Vendors that offer outsourced IT service come in numerous flavors, from Web hosting to back-office apps to backups. Here are just a few: Aelera Offers a range of managed service and software, with a focus on economic regions and community development www.aelera.com DataPreserve Offers hardened remote backup and disaster recovery for small to midsized enterprises www.datapreserve.com Premier Solutions Offers a data center cleaning service to keep dust and irritants away from vital servers www.premiersolutionsco.com External iT Offers device management, application management, and a 24/7 help desk www.externalit.com |
| To Outsource Or Not To Outsource? Analyst Carmi Levy of the Info-Tech Resource Group believes there are right and wrong ways to outsource an IT service. “Just because a service can be outsourced does not necessarily mean that it should be outsourced,” he says. (Disclaimer: Info-Tech analysts write a regular column for Processor.) When should you retain a service? According to Levy, a vendor can be an attractive option if you don’t have the right in-house staff, can’t train the ones you have, or can’t find what you need within the local or regional job market, providing you have a recruitment budget. In contrast, if vendors "are unable or unwilling to customize their offerings to the particular needs of an enterprise," says Levy, look elsewhere or keep things in the family. You should also consider how much work it takes to manage a vendor. "Generally, highly complex, customized environments demand significantly greater degrees of relationship management, which can quickly negate much of the cost advantages of outsourcing.” |
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