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Ask HN: Outsource IT or in-house IT?

2 points by mchanson ↗ HN
We are a small company near San Jose, about 40 employees, running both a small manufacturing operation and about half a dozen web facing applications (12 or so servers). I'm the CTO, have a programming background, and am remote (on the east coast) from the company.

We used an IT outsourcing firm for number of years at $4000 a month (which I suspect is WAY below market rate for a dozen production servers, and 50 or so workstations). They covered monitoring the servers and emergency response, server backup, server upgrades, infrastructure consulting, physical phone and network infrastructure, helpdesk, email, and employees' laptops and desktops maintenance. Basically they did everything IT.

The company is getting out of the physical side of the business. It's a little company which has an Indian office which does most of the maintenance remotely. About two years ago they realized that the business doing remote maintenance of servers was a better business for them and focused in on that. So now they are shutting down the physical side of their business to focus on that remote server monitoring, backup, and maintenance.

So now I'm looking at three major options. First use the company for their remote server monitoring and maintenance, and add an IT employee (a jack of all trades type) to handle the physical stuff. Second look for a IT outsourcing firm that probably covers everything that the old company and not use the old company for anything. Third embrace owning more of IT and putting together a network of freelancers who can cover our needs.

Is one of these options a terrible idea? Is one of these options a great idea? Am I leaving out super important details?

6 comments

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makerops
Hey,

What was the response time of the old firm? What are the stacks of the servers vs workstations? How many hours per week did 4k/mo get you?

mchanson
1. Very Fast, usually less than 15 minutes (less than 5 to an emergency) during the day. And within 10 or so minutes for an escalation (from monitoring or person) 24/7.

2. Two server stacks (co-location and in house). ~ 8 or so physical servers each place. Workstations are about 50 with most being very simple machines in the manufacturing area.

3. It was a flat fee. My guess is it was ~

makerops
What is the differentiation between the colo servers, and the in-house? I am imagining that everything on site, ran the day to day "office" stuff (email, active directory etc); and the colo was something else?
mchanson
Colo is for customer facing systems (we sell software as a service). In house is for helping run the factory and staging / dev systems version of colo systems.
makerops
If it were me, I'd try to compartmentalize the factory/day to day IT stuff, and the dev + colo systems. Having a basic IT shop to handle printers, workstations etc, and a specialist or freelancer to handle the dev + colo work, would be my suggestion. Have you looked at retainers? I was thinking about starting a retainer based IT consultancy (10 hours a month for 1250$ w/ 4 hour response time or something similar). I am curious to see what your thoughts are.
mchanson
Yeah. That is similar to my 3rd thought and very similar to one of the programmer's thoughts. Makes a lot of sense since it would be hard to find the person who wanted to do the day in and day out 'fix the printer' stuff and also have the skills for the more high end stuff.