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In house or outsource i.t. work

10/1/19       
Brett

Hi everyone,
We are a growing cabinet shop with approximately 40-50 employees that does both residential and commercial projects. We have plans of expanding in the future as well. My question for any of you that have shops this size is do you outsource your i.t. work or keep it in house? Any advantages/disadvantages? Right now we outsource it but think it could be an advantage to have one around full time. Then you have the yearly salary for this employee vs. outsourcing. Any thoughts or recommendations are appreciated.

Thanks

10/1/19       #2: In house or outsource i.t. work ...
Alan F.

Is your current IT “on demand” or a Managed service provider?

If you are using “on demand” then my take may be interesting.

We use a managed service provider.

They charge by the user. They insure all updates are current, we are backed up onsite and offsite with a max 1 hour data loss and a 4 hour recovery from failure 24x7.

They stock emergency servers and workstations on the shelf so they can respond to failures.

There are times we are working two shifts, 6 days a week, going down on a Friday and waiting until Tuesday is 6 work days (72 hour business service)

They provide 24x7 monitoring of our network including the firewall, spam filtering (off site), anti-virus, block ad based sites, p0rn, gambling, and anything unsafe.

Each workstation can create their own support tickets and tickets are assigned a level of urgency for response times.

They manage our servers and workstations; create ghost drives and backups for all CNC equipment so we can recover if a drive fails.

We have a code word for an PC on a shop machine that goes down that escalates a tech on site immediately.

They work with the CNC vendors to make sure recover drives that work.

We have Virtual servers and dedicated servers, SAN storage, and field laptops.

We have a equipment life cycle plan and replacement plan going out 5 years.

This is the best IT move we ever made, prior to that I did most the basic, bought out all the pieces we needed and had on demand IT service who also provided and installed hardware.

I think you need to consider the complete cost and who is going to manage this person and their time.

If your 40-50 employees are the office employees then it’s a different question.

Our vendors site is below, its typical for Managed service providers.

We needed a Gold level VMware vendor and that's how we found them. They are about 15 minutes away.

A-

https://solidnetworks.com/services/managed-services/


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