Mid-tier market outsourcing.

One More Saturday Night

I'm edgy, I can't concentrate on the movie, I spilled my drink, my date thinks I'm pre-occupied and is already writing me into her "He's just not into you book."

Can you live this way? Do you want to spend 50% of you time stepping out of that movie to take a call, yell at your vendor sales rep and hope that something can get fixed again this weekend? Do you really like listening to your boss or the CEO complain how nothing works and yet you never really get any time to truly think strategically about what matters to the business and how you can maximize your own personal contribution?

Well, unfortunately, for most IT professionals this is life. 50% of our time is spent fighting fires. Most of the rest of it is documenting and trying to keep watch for the next problem to arise.

No matter how we plan, something always breaks at the wrong time and nobody is ever around at 2AM on Saturday to help you out with the restore of a critical database when it has been corrupted. (Not to mention performing backup job restarts, handling network problems, doing server reboots, etc.).

Of course, you could turn to the big outsourcers like IBM, EDS, CSC and others who can take this problem off of your hands, but they want to take over everything, including your job, make you part of their factory (for now) where creativity is only in their published price book, innovation is left to financial models and new technology is an oxymoron.

Believe it or not, mid-tier enterprises have options and IT outsourcing is possible and affordable. Enter Incentra Solutions. Through experience and automation, you can count on our intelligent, certified, people, tools and process to be there consistently 100% of the time. Whether First Call for an equipment failure or our NOC acting as an extension of your team--monitor, alert, notification and full operational services are available. Any service vendor needs to notify for thresholds and events, resolve those pesky hardware and software problems, escalate and jump the queue with your key vendors, and proactively prevent downtime while minimizing the headaches that come from hardware and software infrastructure centralization as part of the solution.

Until recently, the only alternative for the mid-market was to relocate servers and critical infrastructure to public data centers where collocation space, power and cooling represent inescapable monthly recurring fees. Available offerings from service providers included managed firewalls, server monitoring and in some cases basic backup or storage services. But for today's 24x7x365 enterprise, moving all primary systems to a remote location with a very narrow range of sever and storage options is sub-optimal. As a second site for business continuity and disaster recovery, this public data center is a must. Getting the best Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO/RPO) requires a balance between your team and a partner that has a local touch but the experience of a global business offering can make a huge difference in your options and experience.

The most obvious way to avoid outsourcing is to own or build your own data center, hire and retain your own staff, retire old and buy new equipment each year, monitor that equipment, keep detailed tabs on maintenance contracts, vendor escalation policies, ticketing systems and audit trails. For public entities the matters get worse as executives face jail time for poor records management, and magazine covers show headlines about lost tapes and security breaches almost every week. Throwing more resources at a problem is not the only answer.

Yet, for most businesses in the $250M to $1 Billion revenue range, this is the norm. Living on a limited budget, an understaffed IT team, desperately looking for new tools to reduce the daily noise while trying to handle the pressure for new application development. As the business grows, servers, storage and networking gear appears like popcorn and assuring data RTO and RPOs complete with audit trails are pretty far from reach.

Today's equipment vendors and Value Added Resellers are happy to sell you more equipment, maintenance agreements, professional services deployment and the like. But what happens after the sale is complete? The sales rep is on to the next deal and the maintenance agreement that you have will probably route you to a call center somewhere outside of the United States. You are now in the charge of your own monitoring, support, escalation, troubleshooting and problem resolution.

How Can a Solutions Provider Help?

In general, Solution Providers should bring a more enhanced skill set to the table, providing you with economies of scale and years of experience, as well as proprietary devices, networks, and storage application management software tools. These providers are able to more efficiently give you the highest levels of availability, performance, and data security. Here is what to look for:

When Evaluating Solution Providers--can you get all of it?

- RFI/RFP Creation

- Solutions Design

- Implementation

- Testing & Audits

- 24x7 First Call Support

- Enhanced First Call Support

- Monitoring Services

- Management Services

- Assessments

- BC/DR & Storage Utilities

RFI/RFP Creation

Look to third parties to assist in the development of RFI and RFP documents. A good Independent Solutions Provider can help you organize your requirements, design the RFI/RFP, and manage the process end-to-end.

Solutions Design

A solid design is critical to successful business continuity. Look for multiple options and several different vendor configurations before making a final decision. Some Solutions Providers will also credit back designs if they are awarded the technical implementation.

Implementation

After an appropriate solution is designed, you will need to implement the solution. This implementation could be as simple as a local tape backup with managed off-site archiving or as sophisticated as a replicated 100TB SAN. A solid partner with a proven track record in such implementations is hard to find.

Testing and Audit

No plan is useful unless it is proven to work. You must test your systems rigorously to assure that recovery is in line with your RTO and RPO requirements. With a knowledgeable partner, new items might be identified as ways to improve the process.

24x7 First Call Support

Any solution that you purchase can include first call support. This means the supplier will be the front line of defense with a call center that is able to log your problem, create a ticket, and manage vendor dispatch.

Enhanced First Call Support

Some Solution Providers offer on-line monitoring of systems with rapid escalation and NOC support for proactive notification and vendor escalation that reduces your need for 24x7 staff.

Monitoring Services

For comprehensive reporting support and rapid response times for notification, you may look to Solution Providers who offer 24x7 NOC support and sophisticated monitoring tools covering your entire environment. These types of services offer an alternative to costly SRM tools and the need to have 24x7 staffing.

Management Services

Some Solution Providers have complete management offerings, where they become your Virtual Systems Administrator. Management services include the monitoring described above as well as people, process, tools and automation that eliminate your need to operate the solution altogether. These management services come with strict SLAs as well as detailed reporting and periodic infrastructure testing.

Assessments

It is easy for existing staff to accidentally run into "the forest vs. the trees" issues when it comes to assessing their current environment. Furthermore, most organizations do not have enough staff to do this in an adequate fashion. Look to Solutions Providers for Assessment Services that help you categorize your data and recommend relevant policies for your compliance needs.

BC/DR and Storage Utilities

The utility model is ideal for storage and BC/DR solutions. Utilities are fully managed solutions including all hardware, software, monitoring and management. With a flat fee minimum, you can then pay-as-you-grow in Gigabyte increments. This allows for storage consumption and costs to grow incrementally in parallel for a more predictable cost management solution.

Summary

Complete solution providers are chartered with providing comprehensive IT solutions to enterprises and services providers. Complete is the new mantra. This new class of service provider will not rest until customers feel that their infrastructure is optimized and their applications are getting the maximum attention they deserve. Medium size enterprises seeking complete IT services should seek providers that focus on the mid-tier space with solutions customized for them since the big name service providers will require egregious one-sided agreements. Since OEM manufacturers leave it up to the customer to figure out how to implement their products and most systems integrators tend to stop after the product sale is made, complete solution providers that provide end-to-end capabilities for the mid-tier offer the greatest hope for getting your weekends back while simplifying the IT outsourcing issue.

Walter Hinton is CTO of Incentra Solutions.

www.incentrasolutions.com