Sleep at night with managed services

It is tough for the IT leader of medium sized companies to do everything they need to accomplish given the rapidly changing world and the rapidly changing business needs.   There is a solution.   It is about having a strategy, one that has been created thoughtfully to do target outsourcing of functions by experts in each area that is critical to the business.   Today, there is a great deal of hype around Cloud.   This can satisfy some of the needs, but in reality, there ais a wide range of services that an IT leader needs to deliver.   In the medium sized company, he/she is unlikely to be able to hire the staff to deliver on all of the needs.   

Here is my list of services to outsource for a medium sized IT leader

• Server management as a service - Clouds are great for what they do, but all organizations will have infrastructure that is not outsourced.   
• Network management as a service - Same comment as servers.   The best manage service vendors are specialized.   Look for a good network managed service vendor that is responsible for changes, monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving issues.  Do not accept one that does not monitor and respond.
• End-to-end application monitoring as a service.   End-to-end means you need visibility to the user experience thorugh all layers of the architecture that can affect this experience.   Buy into allowing this outsourced service to declare that events have occurred and orchestrate response across other managed service providers.
• ERP Managed Service or SaaS service - This is very popular for a reason.
• Ecommerce Platform managed service or SaaS - If it is not part of the ERP managed service, it needs to be integrated not only with data but also for incident management and change management.
• eCatalog data integration management as a service - this is a specialty of the Distribution industry.   I'd love to speak with you about this.
• Security management as a service (logs, penetration and vulnerability testing) I would include Phishing training management as a service in this group.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service has a place that can be well tuned for a low-cost public cloud implementation.   
• Email as a service.   This should be on the top of the list.   As you know, it happens to be the most business critical application that no one thinks of until there is a problem.   If it is not outsourced, do it the first day on your new job.

Can you effectively outsource a NOC?

Over the past 10 years, there has been significant growth of two types of outsourced NOC services – I think of these pure-play infrastructure services and targeted application services.   Do they answer the question, “Can you effectively outsource a NOC?”  I believe that these service offerings provide an answer topart of the question and at the same time can create a financial obstacle to solving the whole problem.   But there is another approach.

Pure-play Infrastructure Services

These services include support for network, server operating systems, management of databases, backups and execution of scheduled tasks.   To optimize this service offering, vendors focus on recruiting employees that are knowledgeable in specific horizontal technologies – Cisco, F5, Windows, Linux, Oracle, SQLServer, etc.   They implement good ITIL process and supporting technology.   What is lacking is an understanding of the applications that deliver the business value.   This limits their ability to predict business impact from infrastructure issues and their ability to react to alarms on breaches of transaction and process availability and performance thresholds that directly affect the business.

Targeted Application Services

Outsourced services for SAP, Lawson, Oracle Fusion, Warehouse Management Systems, Content Management Systems, and other similar applications get closer to alignment with business value.   However, many organizations have integrated multiple customized off-the-shelf systems and they have some homegrown systems.   The challenge of this reality is that the integration and interdependencies of these systems has created a single overall lovable Frankenstein of a system for the organization.   Solving the support question of any of the component systems is not sufficient to providing overall coverage for the business.  

The financial obstacle of partial outsourcing

Sometimes I think about Pure-play Infrastructure Services and Targeted Application Services as skimming the cream from milk.   If one is not trying to solve the whole support problem, it is the least expensive approach to get value for the outsourced dollar.   This is why there is a clear business case for outsourcing vendors.   They do provide economies of scale for the hired resources.   The challenge for the buyer is that the dollars that pay for these services are not available to put into the pot to solve the whole problem.  

So, can you effectively outsource a NOC?

Yes.   There is an alternative approach that leverages outsourced resources focused vertically rather than horizontally.   And, if an organization implements a monitoring system that crosses the infrastructure (data centers and cloud) and includes monitoring of the applications and their interdependencies, you can answer the whole question.   A key advantage of implementing the monitoring (and a ticketing system) within the organization is that it provides some additional independence from outsouring vendors.  

T3 Dynamics delivers professional services on monitoring and offers a SaaS offering for end-to-end monitoring.

Would you send your mother to a generalist for open heart surgery?

I was speaking with a colleague last week who had recently lost a valued employee that managed the company’s SANs.    He felt exposed.   This wasn’t the first time he had lost employees who were specialists.   He was thinking that the solution was to hire only generalists and give them on the job training on the many disciplines that one must manage in an IT environment – network, security, SAN, virtualization, Windows admin, Linux admin, monitoring, some DBA skills, scripting, and each of the flavors of vendor solutions of each of these disciplines.  

Cost and transiency

The core of the issue that he faced is that a specialist may be the one that will save your mother’s life if she needs a heart valve replacement, but specialists they cost more than general practitioners.  And finding the right one that wants to live or work in your location may be difficult.   What’s more, many only want to do open heart surgery and if you want them to treat your mother’s arthritis, they may look for another job.

Tactical vs. Big bang outsourcing to the rescue?

While we may all need medical specialists from time to time, we do not consider hiring one as a full time employee.   We outsource.  Since we may not need a continuous relationship with a specific medical specialist, we don’t often interview his/her partners when we are looking for one.  This is tactical outsourcing.   It makes sense for one-off needs.   Hopefully, your mother doesn’t need more than one heart valve replacement.   In California, where we have Kaiser Permanente, we can consider outsourcing all of our medical needs to a single organization.   There are options to do this in IT also.   This Big Bang outsourcing  is a big decision with big risk and significant transition requirements.

The targeted managed service option

The Internet allows diligent workers or service providers with good process and tools to work anywhere at any time for anyone.   I can recommend great managed service providers for DBA services, for JD Edwards CNC services etc.   I think of this as targeted managed services.   The benefit of this approach is that one can get a guaranteed supply of specialized resource that is shared with other customers at a cost that can be less than a full time employee.   

At T3 Dynamics, we are launching a new SaaS and managed service offering for enterprise end-to-end monitoring.   Please let me know if you want to join the no-charge beta offering.