Managed Services The New Frontier........ WHAT?

I woke up this morning thinking about the business model that I am going to shape Secure Technology Partners, Inc. into. The thing that kept sticking in my mind was what Steve Harris, former CEO of Protect Point, which was recently purchased by StillSecure, said to me last week. “It is time for a paradigm shift” on how businesses purchase and implement IT solutions. He said, and I strongly agree, "it is the natural evolution of application delivery".

Of course Steve's company has been offering Managed Security Services for sometime so he has, I am sure, heard many of the objections to this delivery model. However, I think it is now time to really pay attention to this and to consider this type of model for many of your IT Systems.

I think the immediate driver to this type of model is economics (what better timing could you ask for!). If you look at the sheer cost of maintaining a typical IDS/IPS environment, you could most likely justify this this type of application delivery. You have the people that are responsible for the system, the maintenance on the system both hardware and software. You have the soft costs associated with failures and system glitches, and of course the mother load of all costs, a system is compromised.

I have been in many enterprise environments, where there were resources available to do the work in-house, and I have seen, without much trouble, many holes that could be breached in those systems. Primarily, this is due to the fact that the people running those systems are not the experts and that they are often taken off those systems to address higher priority tasks . I don't mean that in an offensive way, however how can they be the expert with all the hats that one has to wear today?

Many administrators have been trained on the systems they are charged to manage. Some have even been pioneers in the adoption of the technology and have worked with it since its inception. However, the disconnect comes from the fact that no system is static. It is forever changing and each change effects other systems and so on down the line. Vendors are constantly changing their applications and upgrading and patching on a daily basis. It is not until a system breaks that you might realize there was a change made.

There is no way humanly possible that, regardless of training, or amount of time spent on the system that administrators can be the expert over and above the vendor providing the solution. The gap comes from your system to theirs. But what if, where ever possible, you were to outsource those critical systems and offload the operational cost to a provider that would be your expert?

Immediately, you should see better service levels, the cost for the system operation should go down, and you now have experts that are trained and have access to resources so that if there is a failure, it is not going to be on your end, taking your resources to figure out their problem.

But is this enough to make the switch? Just consider this. Bob Evans, senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit, wrote "An Open Letter To Oracle CEO Larry Ellison", in the February 2nd, 2009 edition. In it he states some very interesting information regarding Oracles firm stance on charging a FLAT 22% for maintenance to everyone. As consumers who need the technology, you are forced to pay maintenance fees for service that you might never use. In addition, Oracles' President Charles Phillips pointed out, in an InformationWeek interview, that the fee's "fund product development and allow Oracle to create next generation product". Is that what we are paying for? I thought that was figured into the initial cost of the purchase.

Hopefully, you can see my point. The added costs with maintaining an in-house system do not provide you with a higher level of service or any additional benefits, from one that can be truly delivered in a SaaS or Service Provider scenario.

Whether you are looking at backup and recovery, security systems or many other IT systems, many can be supplied as a service. Pay one fee and get the service you require without the overhead expenses, infrastructure cost or liability.

Sounds good to me! I want to deliver what clients want and more importantly need, and to make sure that they are profitable, or at least, not be the cause of their failure, so that I can continue my partnership with them into the future. You can buy the best software & hardware money can buy, however, if it is not implemented and managed correctly it’s not going to work and usually the cost to make it work are far more then you budgeted for. The last thing Steve Harris said to me, and I can relate, “Just because you use Tiger Woods driver, doesn’t mean you will play golf like him”!

Until next time:, Hit em straight!!

Regards,

Jack