Bye Bye jobs...

It has become increasingly clear that service providers are here to stay in my organization. As much as I would like to ignore the fact that my organizations IT footprint has diminished over 30% in the last 2 years, I cannot. There has been many discussions of migrating ALL or MOST of the remaining IT services as well…Including security and compliance.

-If you are in an organization that is pushing more and more services to the cloud, what do you do?

-If you have already seen almost half of your workforce diminished and are participating in conversations about deleting the rest of us, how do you prepare?

-Do you get spun up on cloud technologies, do you look for other jobs, do you look for jobs at these service providers?

-What would you do?

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NetworkNewb

If all the IT jobs are at Service Providers I'd work at a Service Provider... I usually look job boards each day to see what is out there. I'm seeing new jobs getting posted each day that I could apply for and jobs I would like to do in the future posted everyday in my area. If my company doesn't want me I know there is a lot of demand out there for others that do.

networker050184

Service providers are where it's at. I love the size, complexity and diversity of technologies and would get bored easy working in a single environment. Besides, why not work somewhere that the technology is the business?

pramin

networker050184 wrote: »

Service providers are where it's at. I love the size, complexity and diversity of technologies and would get bored easy working in a single environment. Besides, why not work somewhere that the technology is the business?

My sentiments exactly. I have worked for a service provider for most of my IT career. You never get bored with a service provider. Its always a different day; day in and day out.

N2IT

Some really good points being made.

Most of my friends moved on to MSP's and niche technology companies, such as AMI and other utility based technologies. I am currently working in a large enterprise and enjoy it, but I have had to make a lot of sacrifices to hold such a position. I've had to turn my head to a technology pure role in acceptance of a hybrid. The payoff is great, however when I was looking all the pure tech roles were either staff aug with no right to hire or working for an MSP.

No problem there, but this one came up first (due to a relationship formed at a previous company) and I accepted.

Thank ITIL for this movement. It's the framework that set everything in motion. Read the SS book and it's loaded with all the information an executive needs to pull the trigger.

redworld

I, along with 3-400 other, were laid off from a large enterprise environment a couple years back and I quickly made the jump to a cloud provider. Lightyears better job satisfaction with minimal stagnancy in skills because it is so fast-moving.

Managed infrastructure, managed security... short of certain industries where regulatory compliance dictates where a company houses their data, I don't see why most small to mid-size companies don't move to providers and "the cloud". And I think they will eventually. Go where the jobs are.

ccie14023

There is actually a lot of complexity in architecting enterprise cloud solutions. Our own move to AWS and O365 has kept me quite busy as a network architect. That said, there is an obvious decline in internal/enterprise jobs as a result of outsourcing IT, whether to cloud providers or to H1-B companies like TATA. (Maybe get citizenship in another country and then rent yourself back to your company on an H1-B? Hmmm...)

In addition to the service providers themselves, VARs or consulting companies that implement cloud solutions are another option. Or just wait till everybody decides the cloud sucks and pulls everything back inside. 3-5 years would be my guess. It always goes back and forth.

N2IT

@ Redworld absolutely. IT is now classified as a utility IMO, just like a electricity, water, gas etc. It's what ITIL has done to IT. If I owned a company and our line of business wasn't IT I would out source most if not all of it. Why would I want to manage that nonsense why I could get a professional company to do it for me. Set up service based contracts and go from there. If I want electricity I pay for the service just like I would with cable, internet, gas, water etc.

shodown

I agree with pretty much everyone here. The MSP/VAR's provide a level of service that internal teams just can't do. With that said be carefull on what you outsorce even with tight SLA's the MSP/VAR's have limits.

My biggest case in point is call centers. If your company makes money off the phones ringing you should never outsource 100 percent of it to someone. What you get back in SLA's won't cover what you lost in revenue in a lot of cases. Over the past few years I've moved so many call centers back in house as the cloud providers were agile enough to keep up with the call centers. It was a lesson learned. On the flip side I've advocated some other companies move into cloud/managed services because the phones weren't a big part of the business.

LeBroke

N2IT wrote: »

@ Redworld absolutely. IT is now classified as a utility IMO, just like a electricity, water, gas etc. It's what ITIL has done to IT. If I owned a company and our line of business wasn't IT I would out source most if not all of it. Why would I want to manage that nonsense why I could get a professional company to do it for me. Set up service based contracts and go from there. If I want electricity I pay for the service just like I would with cable, internet, gas, water etc.

You're still just a client to an external company. Your internal IT may be understaffed, but at least you know what they're doing stuff for. It's not a matter of meeting SLAs, it's a matter of getting stuff fixed.

Meanwhile, for an outsourcer, the attitude can often be "it's a 10 minute fix, but I don't feel like doing it now. I'll get around to it within a few days, as that's still within our SLA." They have no emotional attachment to getting stuff done, which can be a pretty bad motivator.

NetworkNewb

LeBroke wrote: »

You're still just a client to an external company. Your internal IT may be understaffed, but at least you know what they're doing stuff for. It's not a matter of meeting SLAs, it's a matter of getting stuff fixed.

Meanwhile, for an outsourcer, the attitude can often be "it's a 10 minute fix, but I don't feel like doing it now. I'll get around to it within a few days, as that's still within our SLA." They have no emotional attachment to getting stuff done, which can be a pretty bad motivator.

Not to mention the value of having people soley dedicated to the understanding of your company and also the value of having people onsite when things break.

N2IT

There are advantages to both, but regardless of what You or I think that's the model. It's the way IT has been trending and will continue to trend. For a long time IT exploited the company with bloated budgets and failed solutions. Over commitment under delivery. The execs can only be fleeced so long before they call bullshit. IT really did it to itself and now the service model, such as ITIL has paved the way for a new IT.

Again it's becoming a utility whether you like it or not.

5502george

I understand why they are making the move. They are not in the IT business, nor do they want to be. But what really concerns me is the direction IT support is going.

...I figured that I would start learning amazon AWS here in the near future, I guess its going to be sooner than later...

N2IT

Exactly George.

I remember working on a large enterprise project for a fortune 500 company a few years ago. We literally had a solution in place that would save the company several hundred thousands over the course of 3 years and we had several other companies that went with this technology utilizing and they even performed a lessons learned to the companies IT director. Business case was built everything, he just shook his head and said thanks for offering this solutions but we aren't an IT company.

They really don't care, if you are running XP or 7 or printing off of old hp printers or using new MFD's. They don't give a F.

Iristheangel

N2IT wrote: »

There are advantages to both, but regardless of what You or I think that's the model. It's the way IT has been trending and will continue to trend. For a long time IT exploited the company with bloated budgets and failed solutions. Over commitment under delivery. The execs can only be fleeced so long before they call bullshit. IT really did it to itself and now the service model, such as ITIL has paved the way for a new IT.

Again it's becoming a utility whether you like it or not.

You really think the majority of IT teams were trying to exploit companies? I think the problem is more a lack of communication or understanding than IT trying to go out and fleece management. Most IT guys I've met are so beaten down that they're afraid to ask for money and let things ride past support because they have no concept of how to communicate why it's needed. Telling an executive that you need $2M for an infrastructure refresh is going to get some raised eyebrows and viewed as "un-needed" on principle unless something is down or breaking. Telling an executive that the $2M refresh is required since all the infrastructure is past it's last day of support and no longer receiving critical firmware/IOS patches which results in the company unable to pass their PCI compliance which results in fines/lost business/etc is deemed necessary. Finding the business reason and communicating it is the bigger problem I've seen, not IT staff going out an fleecing the company.

As far as cloudy clouds, MSPs, outsourcing IT, blah... I've seen enough companies bring that crap back inhouse after it failed because they didn't look at the business needs, how their applications were run, what regulatory compliance they needed to adhere to, etc. Not saying it's not possible for some companies to save money going in that direction but good luck trying to view it as a "one size fits all" solution.

5502george

N2IT wrote: »

Exactly George.

I remember working on a large enterprise project for a fortune 500 company a few years ago. We literally had a solution in place that would save the company several hundred thousands over the course of 3 years and we had several other companies that went with this technology utilizing and they even performed a lessons learned to the companies IT director. Business case was built everything, he just shook his head and said thanks for offering this solutions but we aren't an IT company.

They really don't care, if you are running XP or 7 or printing off of old hp printers or using new MFD's. They don't give a F.

I just don't see it going any other way. I either jump on the cloud bandwagon or try and stay optimistic about companies keeping internal IT depts.

I once thought security would be my saving grace; that it would never be in the hands of a provider...wrong again.

Iristheangel

NetworkNewb wrote: »

Not to mention the value of having people soley dedicated to the understanding of your company and also the value of having people onsite when things break.

Yes, domain knowledge of the company is definitely important. I've seen a lot of MSP's claim to have experts and provide 24/7 monitoring, troubleshooting, etc only to have them be duds (Shodown, you know who I'm talking about! :P) and then have to clean up the mess they made. An MSP is like being in a marriage - it seems great at first but slowly they get comfortable, start learning the door open when they go to the bathroom, eating a little too much, farting around each other, letting go :P Ok, maybe not MY marriage, but I think you guys get the point :P

E Double U

Iristheangel wrote: »

An MSP is like being in a marriage - it seems great at first but slowly they get comfortable, start learning the door open when they go to the bathroom, eating a little too much, farting around each other, letting go :P

Sounds about right LOL

tkerber

Here we go again, doom and gloom. I agree with Iris... I used to work for a fairly large MSP and now I work for a large tech company.. I think one of the biggest disadvantages to going the MSP / managed services route is that your data and your infrastructure is in the hands of people who are in charge of not only your infrastructure and data, but the infrastructure and data of hundreds of other companies---in some cases even thousands... As technology evolves we are getting closer and closer to turning IT into a utility like electricity but I don't think we're there yet.

What's interesting is at the MSP I worked at we saw companies who eventually 'graduated' and got their own IT department. Once some of our clients got to a certain size or had sophisticated environments an MSP would no longer have the man power required to keep them up. Many of them eventually hired their own Systems Administrator / IT Administrator and grew from there.

5502george

tkerber wrote: »

Here we go again, doom and gloom. I agree with Iris... I used to work for a fairly large MSP and now I work for a large tech company.. I think one of the biggest disadvantages to going the MSP / managed services route is that your data and your infrastructure is in the hands of people who are in charge of not only your infrastructure and data, but the infrastructure and data of hundreds of other companies---in some cases even thousands... As technology evolves we are getting closer and closer to turning IT into a utility like electricity but I don't think we're there yet.

What's interesting is at the MSP I worked at we saw companies who eventually 'graduated' and got their own IT department. Once some of our clients got to a certain size or had sophisticated environments an MSP would no longer have the man power required to keep them up. Many of them eventually hired their own Systems Administrator / IT Administrator and grew from there.

Well, time will tell for my company. They have made the decision and while they have not publically stated their intentions, all of the pointers are there.

I hope that you and Iris are correct. That current managed offerings are subpar and that companies would justify IT dept expenses.

But unfortunately that is not the case thus far from my exp.

GreaterNinja

Iristheangel wrote: »

Yes, domain knowledge of the company is definitely important. I've seen a lot of MSP's claim to have experts and provide 24/7 monitoring, troubleshooting, etc only to have them be duds (Shodown, you know who I'm talking about! :P) and then have to clean up the mess they made. An MSP is like being in a marriage - it seems great at first but slowly they get comfortable, start learning the door open when they go to the bathroom, eating a little too much, farting around each other, letting go :P Ok, maybe not MY marriage, but I think you guys get the point :P

Its not kinky unless it's stinky.

Iristheangel

5502george wrote: »

Well, time will tell for my company. They have made the decision and while they have not publically stated their intentions, all of the pointers are there.

I hope that you and Iris are correct. That current managed offerings are subpar and that companies would justify IT dept expenses.

But unfortunately that is not the case thus far from my exp.

Oh there ARE great MSP offerings out there but the great ones are not cheap at all and if some company is just looking at a bottom line when picking an MSP, well... They get what they paid for. Or much much LESS

N2IT

It's not doom and gloom it's fact

Outsourcing OCONUS and CONUS has been in play for a long time and it hasn't slowed down at all.

The facts - A company can set up a contract with a MSP on an exclusive fix fee contract and know exactly what their cost will be each month. This includes hardware, project work, resource utilization etc. It becomes the MSP's responsibility who assumes the risk for loss of profits. While the MSP can build in a thicker margin, the corporation will glad accept the higher cost, if they can keep their expenditures even. Finance departments HATE ebbs and flows in budgeting. If you forecast a budget at 2 million dollars and it exceeds it by 2 million you have some very unhappy executives. With the MSP your cost a near fixed and the company knows how much money it has to operate with.

IT is not the only one who has a target to get outsourced. HR, Sales, Customer Service etc.

Facts and Figures on Outsourcing
This is just the number of off shore outsourcing jobs but as you can see there is a clear trend dating back from 2000.
While I agree there are some really bad MSP’s out there, there are also some very good ones as well. It’s up to the executive team to make sure to do their research and build the partnership that makes the most sense for both parties. Is the MSP large enough to handle their client’s needs? Does it provide the correct service offerings? Skilled labor, etc the list goes on and on. But instead of paying a ton of money to an IT worker in – house, why not out source them and control your cost?

I have drafted up RFP's in the past to secure IT engagements, I know this world and know it well. It's not going anywhere and one or two, "one off" disasters stories will not discourage large corporation for continuing down that path. Like any new business it takes time to grow together. If both parties are looking to build a relationship it can work extremely well.

@IRIS

Telling an executive that the $2M refresh is required since all the infrastructure is past it's last day of support and no longer receiving critical firmware/IOS patches which results in the company unable to pass their PCI compliance which results in fines/lost business/etc is deemed necessary. Finding the business reason and communicating it is the bigger problem I've seen, not IT staff going out an fleecing the company

If I was an executive why would I want to deal with this? I would much rather set up a fix fee contract and let an MSP manage this for me. If I incur fines those would be passed back onto the MSP, for breech of SLA.

5502george

N2IT wrote: »

It's not doom and gloom it's fact

Outsourcing OCONUS and CONUS has been in play for a long time and it hasn't slowed down at all.

The facts - A company can set up a contract with a MSP on an exclusive fix fee contract and know exactly what their cost will be each month. This includes hardware, project work, resource utilization etc. It becomes the MSP's responsibility who assumes the risk for loss of profits. While the MSP can build in a thicker margin, the corporation will glad accept the higher cost, if they can keep their expenditures even. Finance departments HATE ebbs and flows in budgeting. If you forecast a budget at 2 million dollars and it exceeds it by 2 million you have some very unhappy executives. With the MSP your cost a near fixed and the company knows how much money it has to operate with.

IT is not the only one who has a target to get outsourced. HR, Sales, Customer Service etc.

Facts and Figures on Outsourcing
This is just the number of off shore outsourcing jobs but as you can see there is a clear trend dating back from 2000.
While I agree there are some really bad MSP’s out there, there are also some very good ones as well. It’s up to the executive team to make sure to do their research and build the partnership that makes the most sense for both parties. Is the MSP large enough to handle their client’s needs? Does it provide the correct service offerings? Skilled labor, etc the list goes on and on. But instead of paying a ton of money to an IT worker in – house, why not out source them and control your cost?

I have drafted up RFP's in the past to secure IT engagements, I know this world and know it well. It's not going anywhere and one or two, "one off" disasters stories will not discourage large corporation for continuing down that path. Like any new business it takes time to grow together. If both parties are looking to build a relationship it can work extremely well.

Yeah!!!!! There is hope! Security is on the safe list! I do physical and facility security as alternate duties.

shodown

N2IT wrote: »

If I was an executive why would I want to deal with this? I would much rather set up a fix fee contract and let an MSP manage this for me. If I incur fines those would be passed back onto the MSP, for breech of SLA.

I do work with a lot of MSP with my daily consulting. No MSP in there right mind is gonna do a fixed contract to rip and replace all the network gear that maybe EOL/EOS or dealing with a company PCI compliance. They will inform the customer during quarterly meetings and status of gear, and work on setting up a project to get it done, but they won't do it under any SUPPORT contract unless there are HUGE margins built in. Case in point. Its pretty easy to replace a switch at a branch office if its EOS, but lets say they want to replace a core switch at a campus site. That requires setting up down time, meeting with multiple business leaders, work. Why would a MSP want to take on this risk?

Iristheangel

N2IT wrote: »

@IRIS

Telling an executive that the $2M refresh is required since all the infrastructure is past it's last day of support and no longer receiving critical firmware/IOS patches which results in the company unable to pass their PCI compliance which results in fines/lost business/etc is deemed necessary. Finding the business reason and communicating it is the bigger problem I've seen, not IT staff going out an fleecing the company

If I was an executive why would I want to deal with this? I would much rather set up a fix fee contract and let an MSP manage this for me. If I incur fines those would be passed back onto the MSP, for breech of SLA.

I will say that there are some "black box" MSP service offerings out there that do actually "rent" you the infrastructure you're using and replace it as needed but from what I've seen, it's a) not cost effective by any means and b) a huge liability to the client because they are literally locked in with that MSP and if they ever find the offering undesirable or the MSP raises their rates every year, the customer has no option to not renew the contract or fire them quickly because they're put in the spot of either doing the same thing with another MSP and/or rip and replacing their whole infrastructure which technically belongs to the MSP and having to find money to pay for that $2M of infrastructure QUICKLY. I'm yet to come across a large enterprise in my 150 large company patch that's stupid enough to do this. I have a few companies that deal with MSPs for remote site work and NOC operations to some level - I definitely believe that the lower level IT work is easily outsourced but the design, engineering, and IT direction is still managed by a central staff of engineers and project managers. Case in point: Look at Disney. It's well known that they have part of their IT outsourced and continue to outsource certain parts of their IT but I know dozens and dozens of infrastructure engineers who have worked there for 10+ years and they're hiring like crazy in Los Angeles.

In short, MSPs tend to take over the T1/T2 operations and troubleshooting for a fix fee and sometimes they'll be so "kind" to rent you the infrastructure as well which locks the client in in a bad way. The complex designs, projects, devops, etc are not part of that scope and you're paying billable hours for it - thus your cost is not set in stone and it does fluctuate even with an MSP.

I'm not trying to pick on you, N2IT. We had another thread about this same thing where you stated that going the MSP and cloud route was cheaper than having inhouse IT and I think myself and a couple people disagreed with you then as well. It sounds like based upon your comments here, you're agreeing with us on that point now but you view it as acceptable to pay more as long as that rate is fixed. Unfortunately, I'm yet to see any MSP offering a "full buffet" of services, project management, project work, infrastructure, etc at a fixed rate. It's a lot like AWS for example. You're allowed x cents to run a small/medium/large instance per hour but that doesn't mean you get unlimited storage, all the licensing in the world, or full use of all the bandwidth you could never need. Those are additional costs and those costs add up like crazy. This happened to a client of mine that projected $50K a month for cloud based on existing server utilization + 25% growth. By the time their first year was over, they had grown to $500K/month thanks to all the other backend costs you don't see in the background. There's certain cases where the "economy of scale" doesn't work

N2IT

shodown wrote: »

Why would a MSP want to take on this risk?

As a loss leader to get into the door and procure more advantagous service offerings that maybe available down the road. Access management, NOC, Help desk, desktop support etc.

N2IT

Iris you make some solid points, and I don't disagree with what you are saying altogether.

One piece that was left out is the strategic partnerships. Accenture for instance is the biggest reseller of HP equipment. They can get hardware for basically nothing, relatively speaking. Through strategic partnerships SOME MSPs can just flat undercut centralized in-house operations, especially when you are going through a massive infrastructure changes. If the hardware cost is passed back to the customer, they can provide the hardware for a fraction of the cost. That is something that is usually missed in these conversations.

Iris it's cool I know you aren't picking on me. I'm basically touting MSP's in a exam forum. I deserved to get railed, I clearly don't know my audience.

I know one thing we can agree on. It's a tricky business and very complex.

Iristheangel

Some of the larger MSPs I worked with in the past and still have close contacts with include CDW, Insight, DiData, etc. I've never seen ANY of them take on an MSP offering at a loss. They would rather lose the business than offer up a huge MSP undertaking to a large company at a loss and put themselves in a position to be accountable for fines, compliance, etc. It wouldn't make sense. As far as the smaller MSPs, they couldn't keep their doors open taking it as a loss but then again, small MSPs go out of business all the time

Iristheangel

Meh. It's ok. I work with Accenture as well on several of my accounts. Trust me, they definitely don't undercut at all and I'm talking dealing with them on Fortune 500 companies so no small shops here. They're definitely getting their pound of flesh in the fine print

Question for you, N2IT: Are you working for a vendor, partner, IT consulting firm, or MSP at all right now? Or are you more based in an enterprise?

N2IT

Large enterprise at the moment.

I have worked for several MSP in the past, mainly in a strategic or tactical role. (More tactical usually)

Just for the record, I have no desire of going back to a MSP ever again. Just saying......

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