On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Wes Kussmaul <wes@authentrus.com> wrote:

> ron minnich wrote:
>
>  How is it that companies that want you to buy their IT expertise
>> outsource their own? It makes no sense.
>>
>
> Equally true story. We used to run our own servers. A (name withheld)
> sysadmin always felt he knew better than management how servers should be
> configured and managed even when in fact he did not. So we went to
> Rackspace, where we are treated as customers and where sysadmins manage the
> resource as directed. And they're available 24/7/365.
>
> There are two sides to this. You have a point, but so does Nicholas Carr.
>
>
>
Also distributing security patches across many "islands of IT" is more
difficult than updating it in one place and beating the snot out of it to
make sure it's right isn't it?

I mean, say your company has 25 satellite offices... why should they all
have to do redundant work to update all the systems across the board.  Isn't
the repetition going to cause a higher chance of someone missing something?

Then again, you're left with the trade off of a "all eggs in one basket" to
some extent when you outsource.  How much worse is it really?

I once worked for <redacted company name> in the late 90s.  They still used
a mainframe system, even though everyone connected to it with a PC on their
desk, including the temps they hired (me) to do inventory stuff.  This
system would sometimes get a little, what I'd call, fucking slow, and yet
I'd still see the logic in only maintaining that mainframe one time instead
of having Nick Burns, you're company's computer guy, have to come around and
fix everyone else's windows workstation when they screwed up their ability
to work.

My guess is productivity was up, despite the slowdowns in the network, due
to the use of a centralized system.

Can "sticking everything in the cloud" give the same benefits?  I'm not 100%
convinced, but to say there were no advantages to the old model is probably
not realistic, though it's fun to complain about stuff instead of working,
which is what I'm going to do now :-)

Dave