ICT Failure Is Not an Option
Why you need to outsource your ICT services from a reputable service. Our CEO Eddie Lyons uncovers the perils of not finding a trustworthy supplier, and highlights what smart business owners look out for.
Your enterprise is completely dependent on your ICT systems, unless you are some sort of solitary craft worker. Actually, even then, today you need the web to publicise and sell your bog oak candle holders or whatever. Email and the internet are used by almost everyone in work, while all organisations use financial accounts software and some form of office software for letters and reports, spreadsheets and presentations.
But that is all just baby business stuff. Smart businesses use fully joined up systems that automate most of their processes. Today a huge and growing proportion of our telephony is digital and computer-based, as of course is video, and although there are regular media bleats and hype about the volume of email we use at work who would be without it? As for payments, from supermarket checkouts to salaries to Ryanair flights, our smart modern world would grind to a halt without our ICT.
All of which raises one simple question for any manager or company director: if your IT failed, where would you be?
In an extremely difficult position is the optimistic answer. You would probably be out of business, as in not doing any business, for a period. You could also be out of business. Period.
But in truth we are not really talking about disaster recovery or even business continuity. There are well-established disciplines and methodologies to provide for those contingencies. What about the management of your ICT systems, day-to-day and into the future?
- Are your people terrific at it, on top of all the technical skills required, thoroughly up to date with the many complex technologies?
- Is your team big enough to cover 24x7 operations, with provision for holiday cover?
- Are you taking advantage of the many economic and technical benefits of cloud computing—or planning to?
If you can answer ‘Yes’ to all of these you are either managing a major corporation or in some alternate reality. Most Irish organisations, especially in the somewhat ill-defined ‘medium’ category with say from a few dozen to a few hundred staff, are perennially short of ICT resources, technical and human. Some of that is post-recession, because even organisations that previously had an ‘IT team’ in some sense were forced to downsize it.
Outsourcing to ICT experts
Right now, and certainly into the future, the decision to be made is clear: do we invest again and build up our in-house ICT skills or do we look for a business partner to help us instead? To which the best advice has not really changed for most enterprises: do what you do best and outsource the rest!
Having an external IT company manage your servers, network and general infrastructure is as old as desktop PCs. But in the last decade we have seen the growth of many expert and specialist managed service providers. We have also, in Ireland as in other markets, seen competition raise the service level standards of those companies to high and even world class levels. When you are talking about, for example, data centres or cloud computing there are in fact no other standards.
The IT services available range from the thoroughly traditional ‘break-fix’ and preventive maintenance monitoring to a fully featured service which is almost literally ICT-as-a-Service. The former is still fairly adequate for SMEs with servers on-site and a LAN, although almost all of those today have a growing level of mobile and remote working which will need more sophisticated set-up and support.
The increasingly popular alternative is to outsource all or most of your ICT resources. These days that will be almost entirely off-premise. Your staff will have their own PCs and offices will have a LAN, often wireless. But your enterprise applications run on and your data will stored on servers in a private section of a data centre or will consist of virtual servers in a shared facility or in the cloud. Is this in any respect less secure or reliable than having your systems on your own site? The short answer is universal: No. A data centre or cloud provider will have depths of resources beyond anything but a large multinational. They are in business to provide reliability and availability at a scale and level no private organisation can hope to emulate. Could your organisation even begin to think about a 365x24 manned control room?
What happens is that such risks as there are become different. For example, your connectivity to the remote resource—Internet access or leased data line—becomes more of a risk because it could well be a single point of failure. But the traditional dangers of server failure or data loss are greatly reduced. Data security is another issue that is still misunderstood—and probably one of the main reasons why the industry developed the ‘cloud computing’ term rather than calling it ‘Internet computing’. The key point is that all data centres and cloud and other managed IT service providers have invested enormous resources in data protection and anti-intrusion measures. They employ the world’s best expertise outside of state and military agencies and, sad to say, some major criminal enterprises.
Clear benefits of outsourcing
All in all the protection will be in a superior league to anything the normal organisation can provide for itself. There have been some well-publicised scandals of data breaches in recent years, with huge numbers of credit card details released for example. But it should be pointed out that the vast bulk of these instances were of human carelessness within the organisations holding the data. The security dangers that don’t go away with outsourced IT certainly include your own people doing unauthorised things.
The overall argument for seriously considering the outsourcing of your ICT needs is actually the same as the security answer: you can employ world class systems and resources and people. You can also pay your budgeted fees by the month as an operating expense with no capital outlay.
After that, the best advice is the same as for any other business choice of partner, senior employee, supplier or investment. Look around, talk to people who have done something similar, get potential service providers or consultants to advise you, do your own research to see what might suit your organisation. Then draw up lists and revise them and refine them until you have as clear a summary of your requirements and your ambitions as you can manage. Then talk again to a short list of experts.
One of the many topical lines of debate in ICT is whether the CIO [Chief Information Officer] or IT Director/Manager of the future will have an in-house team at all or will be more like a chief procurement officer or services broker specialising in all things digital. Like a CEO and the Board, the role will be to make the best decisions and choices. Everything else can be delegated or outsourced.
