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Where Would You Outsource Your Datacenter?
An anonymous reader asks: "I want to outsource everything in our rackspace to reputable online providers. After wasting valuable time every day on mundane problems and upgrades, I'm convinced it's cheaper to pay monthly than maintain our hardware and staff time. So I ask you, Slashdot: who would you turn to for reliable and secure outsourcing of a VPN server, Exchange server, online backup, and webserver hosting?"
Since you put it that way: I'd turn it over to no one but myself. Every time I've tried "outsourcing" some component of my online presence (web hosting, DNS, e-mail account), I've come to regret it. I'd rather pull what's left of my hair out fixing something myself than put up with someone else's incompetence. Your Mileage May Vary, but I've found the minuses outweigh the plusses.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I host my newspaper at EV1servers, but that's not what you need.
What you need is to outsource all of the day-to-day grunt work. My other company could do email for you but we don't do webservers.
Have you considered splitting it up?
You need to dump Exchange. its the most horrible, time-consuming, labour-intensive and expensive email system possible.
If you must stick with Windows (horrible server OS), "Rackspace.com" does Windows and I've never heard any complaints about them. They aren't cheap, but they are cheaper than having staff and they are very good at what they do. You won't have to worry about them keeping up to date or knowing what to do in case of a problem.
As someone else said, you need to list all the things you do, enter the time and effort and run comparisons. Also, you need to consider the qualiy of the work your staff does and compare it to the quality of the outsource shop.
I know you're not going to take it offshore - the savings are not worth the trouble and while labour costs are lower, hardware and network costs are not. Security is probably important to you - another reason not to offshore.
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Few things are more obvious to techies than the need to outsource one's management. While a company is small enough for its people to care, the technical folks tend to know what they're doing and why they're doing it and how it all hangs together, and management is just a burden.
Then after a bit of growth, things rapidly turn a lot worse, because management starts to think that it's they who are providing the company's value, and that the techies are just labor.
Long before that happens, the admin and all tiers of management should be outsourced and/or subcontracted out, reporting back to interested techies purely as an external paper-pushing service, nothing more.
It's the only way to stop management getting airs and graces.
The parent isn't in the least bit funny. What's funny (in a sad way) is that techies in this tech-based society let themselves get pushed into a pure-labor subservient role beneath people who are technically clueless and incompetent.
My company did just that and they were stupid enough to sign a contract that doesn't include any service level agreements, just blank statements of the type that company such-and-such will provide this and this and that. When? Nobody knows - as long as they do it on the last day of contract (2 years) they're good.
What did we get? Hosted email server that is down several times a week, unstable VPN, 30 something servers still waiting replacement, lack of central backup facility, more promises and IT dept decreased to 2 people treated like shit (1 of which is me).
New GM seems to have brains, so he's started pressing very hard and looks like he's going to manage to get out of contract. Once he does that, IT dept. will shrink further because the day the contract is terminated and IT services brought back in house I shall resign with great satisfaction of being right from the beginning and the opportunity to rub few big noses.
So, my advice to Ask /. inquiry is DO NOT DO IT! Find couple of people who are competent and who care - you'll be surprised how much good work and cost saving can be made by just two guys like that.