How Managed Service Providers (MSPs) Benefit Both the Business and IT Teams
I'm Max Clark. This is 20 minutes Max. A dynamic that I'm noticing a lot lately is friction between executive teams and IT teams related to staffing and resources. And what I mean by this is it's pretty universal that executive teams think about their IT function as it relates to resources, whether that's, you know, staffing, equipment, OPEX, so with with SaaS subscriptions, contracts, vendors, you know, this whole thing kinda gets boiled down at a really core base level as resource availability. How many resources do they have?
Speaker 1:Can they accomplish their mission with the resources? And this and a lot of times gets expressed with the desire to bring in third parties, bring in MSPs, bring in, cloud services, bring in, you know, infrastructure that's external to the organization to that way augment their resources so that way they can support the business and accomplish the actual business objectives and goals. Now the friction that's coming that always seems to be here is with, you know, IT teams that still want to maintain control or think that they have to maintain control as part of their job. And if they give up control that they're giving up their job. And this is a really I would have thought that by this point this idea would have passed and we could have moved on beyond this, but this is still occurring.
Speaker 1:And in 25 years of doing this I have never seen an MSP result you know, hiring an MSP result in IT teams being let go. So the actual network engineers, admins, help desk, server admins, etcetera. I have never seen an MSP displace staffing within a company. And usually the conversation I'm having with a CTO is we have, you know, and it's it's really incredible because they know the numbers. Exactly.
Speaker 1:We're spending $9,000,000 in our CICD pipeline for example between our DevOps team and the infrastructure required to run it. And I would rather have that 9 person DevOps team be doing something else for us because maintaining the CICD pipeline is not high value for us. So I wanna outsource this CICD pipeline end to end. And not only is it you know, because I have on those 12 DevOps people doing something else. So not only is it worth spending, you know, $9,000,000 for me.
Speaker 1:It's actually worth spending more than $9,000,000 if I can free up that 12 headcount to go do other things that actually generate high value for the business. And and that's where the CTO is coming from. But then you've got this team and this team looks at this and and starts going and saying, but wait, this is our job. And if we don't do this job, then we're not needed here anymore and and or or we're afraid. I'm usually CTO's communicating, like, I want you to do other things.
Speaker 1:But there becomes this resistance of, like, well, this is our job. And if we let go of this thing, then then we're not needed here anymore, and our job's at risk. And and and the conversation is like no no no what your job is right now is terrible and your cto is trying to make your job not terrible and your cto really wants you to do other things and and listen and trust your cto in this case and do other things and it's just really weird it becomes as a really weird position where you know, you have teams of people working against their own interests of being able to actually do things that increase their value to the organization. By the way, when you increase your value to the organization, there's a bunch of other things that come by as byproducts that you probably really want, which let's just say at the basic. You got better compensation usually.
Speaker 1:Right? You know? I mean, people if you're more valuable to the company you're working for, you usually get paid more. You get better equity. You get, you know, you get perks.
Speaker 1:You get advancement. You get training. I mean, there's there's a whole you know? There there's this is really these are good things. I don't know where the stems from.
Speaker 1:I don't know really how to fix this. It really feels like this is a personality issue. Issues, you know, like within hiring, you know, are people looking for expansion or people just looking for control of their little domain and they can't let it go. I mean, 10 years ago, you know, the the negative was the server huggers, you know, this was the my original migrations into the cloud of the server hugger IT people that weren't gonna let go of their servers because they were freaked out if they let go of their servers and it went to the cloud, they'd lose their jobs. And guess what?
Speaker 1:Companies still cannot hire enough people to manage their clouds now. I mean, this is not, let me actually correct an earlier statement. Yes. I have seen MSPs result in in IT, you know, people being let go. But those IT people's jobs were already, they'd already convinced the company that they needed to move on, and the company was looking for a way to actually facilitate that.
Speaker 1:And so, you you know, it resulted. So an MSP was brought in in order to stopgap that. Now let me think about this in 25 years. How many times have I seen this? How many outsourcings have I seen per year or MSPs coming in per year in 25 years that resulted in no change the internal IT organization and actually in many cases expansion of the internal IT organization because they're providing more business value a couple of month every year for for 20 plus years.
Speaker 1:If you're an IT practitioner and let's just start at the really low end. Right? Let's say, you're doing a help desk function where you're supporting an end user with app business applications or signing into their email or with their you know file and print operations chances are that company that you're working for is not gonna try to outsource the tier one help desk. It happens. It usually happens for 247 coverage, not necessarily for peak hours during the day.
Speaker 1:But the point that I wanna make here is if that is your current job and you wanna advance your job so that, you know, tracks are usually like help desk to server administration or help desk to network administration. You know, but the point here is is that you wanna level up or security. You wanna level up and you wanna do something else. Well, in order to level up and do something else, you have to be replaceable. Right?
Speaker 1:The company has to replace you either because you've automated your job to the point where it requires less and less of your time and attention. You can do other things or they need to be replaceable in the sense of, like, somebody else is gonna do your job and you can move forward. And again, I will tell I will say this from experience. Your company wants you to advance they've made a huge investment when they hired you and brought you into the fold you have relationships you're the easiest place for them to, you know, place more responsibility on to these are all really good things for you should make it as easy as possible for your company to help you progress and being accepting of MSPs coming in is what are the ways that you can do this. And the value of the MSP for instance is I mean it goes beyond just like staffing and resources right like there's this whole idea around like and I think about this a lot of you know what happens if you know I stop a bus right so that's a phrase it's pretty common and our operations at jeopardy if I have some sort of catastrophic event happened to me personally So that's one way of looking at it.
Speaker 1:Right? When we talk about resources, you know, sometimes it's just staffing and it's just redundancy from the standpoint of, like, hey. Do you wanna take a vacation without your cell phone and the laptop? Do you wanna go out at night? Do you wanna go to a concert?
Speaker 1:Do you wanna go to a concert without a laptop? This is extremely common. I know people doing this. You know? Do you wanna be driving down the freeway and have to pull over and get on your laptop?
Speaker 1:Now, with phone tethering, it's much easier than used to be. We, you know, carry around mobile hotspots but, you know, does this the life that you really wanna live? You wanna live a life where you have to pull over on the side of the road or leave a concert or leave a bar or, you know, be on vacation in your room while, you know, your your partner's outside and on the beach enjoying r and r and jet skis or whatever is going on. And you're sitting there on a computer typing away because there's no plan for you to not be connected all the time. If you're in that situation you need to start changing that situation.
Speaker 1:So, strategically leveraging MSPs are a great way of doing that. Other thing that MSPs do that are very good and this is also the difference between a good MSP and a bad MSP. So make sure, you know, you're talking to good MSPs. Good as MSPs will help you document, develop process, and scale. A good s MSP has to develop this.
Speaker 1:In order for the MSP to scale, we're talking no. We're not, you know, I'm not talking about, like, your neighborhood. I don't wanna say mom and pop, but let's just say your neighborhood MSP that's got, you know, a 10 to 20, you know, employees, 10 to 20 engineers. You know? It could be very good at what they do, but 10 to 20 engineers is not scale.
Speaker 1:I'm talking about, you know, 50, a 100, 200, 500,000 engineers. Now, you know, a scale comes, you know, issues with personalization and uniqueness and and and, you know there's other ways of achieving that and and you know pod architectures in terms of staffing and support are very common because it still gives us idea of like a smaller experience maybe the pods only 10 people so the pod replicates that little msp you know that's in the neighborhood but you get, you know, a much bigger scale and a much bigger bench resources behind it. So MSPs are really good because of resources and process and scale. The other thing that you get out of this is you get an entity that you can sue. Now from an organizational standpoint, that's you know, I mean, the threat of that or the idea that's always really good.
Speaker 1:You know? What happens if something terrible happens? Somebody deletes all of your data. Right? You know?
Speaker 1:If it's you, I mean, you know, what's the financial recourse there? There is no financial recourse. If you have an MSPN and that MSP is bound to a contract you know a contractual obligation to you and there's usually a there's usually a slas involved and there's performance targets and they have to carry insurance and there's all those other things that go into it there is in the worst worst case scenario there's recourses that can be taken and that's usually a really it's really also a good a gun a good thing and a benefit for the business to have. You know I I mentioned like this idea of like the server hugger earlier you know here's another way that I I see this happening right now. And I can parallel this, with my own career track to a certain degree, you know, when I when I started networking and was, you know, very early network engineer, what did I want?
Speaker 1:You know, the things that I wanted were the things that I didn't have experience with. Right? So it became I wanted really big chassis routers, you know, like, oh, how cool would it be to be, you know, back then, by the way. This is when Cisco 65 100 just came out, you know, 12,000 GSRs were still the hot rage. This is how small the Internet it was and how big.
Speaker 1:I mean, how how old I am. But after you deploy a bunch of 65170 612,000 and then you upgrade to ISR 9 k's and you do some MX's and, you know, you get to a point where you're where you're just like, I don't wanna touch this stuff anymore. I don't wanna own this stuff anymore. I remember the last ASR 9 k that I purchased, and we were installing it in our data center in in, CoreSite in Los Angeles and, I I just remember having this think of this this thought of like this is the last router I want to purchase. Of course, I want to purchase routers again because I'm a nerd and I want to have BGP devices connect to the Internet because I don't even know what I would do with them but, the point there is, you know, you're gonna have people on your team especially, you know, junior staff coming up that don't have experience with these things.
Speaker 1:I don't have experience running them or supporting them or maintaining them and they're gonna want that experience. And and your goal, of course, is provide them training, education, and career track where, you know, they're getting these things without the idea of, like, as you're making a firewall decision, the overwhelming influence that you're receiving from them is, like, oh, I want this firewall because I've never had this firewall before. And so therefore, I wanna have this firewall so I can use this firewall and play with this firewall. And maybe you don't want firewalls. And by the way, you don't want firewalls.
Speaker 1:You wanna be on a next generation cloud based firewall. Why? Because oh my goodness. If you purchase a firewall you know, let's just say you get a cheap firewall. You purchase a firewall for 15 to $20,000, then you have to have a second firewall.
Speaker 1:You have to have a pair of them. Then you have to have support. So now you're $30,000 in. You're paying 20% support per year. You got 6 k in support.
Speaker 1:Right? So you got $20,000 in purchase. You've got another 18 dollars 1,000 in support. Now you have to have an IT team that can manage it. You still probably have an MSP to provide support and augmented service because there's things that you guys just don't do normal, you know, day to day internally.
Speaker 1:Now you gotta provide software updates on that box that bought you know, you know, so depending on your manufacturer, maybe you have to buy software support separately in order to get software updates or not. You've gotta schedule those updates. You gotta make sure things are working. You know, you're limited based on processor and capacity on the actual box. You start talking about all these fancy terminologies like UTM and DPI and what the heck is DPI and UTM in the first place?
Speaker 1:Nobody knows. But, you know, that the the capacity to, provide a positive outcome for your company with that on premise firewall is terrible. I mean, it's just lousy. You know? When you look at the alternatives on the market that's available today, there's just better choices.
Speaker 1:There is a reason why Cisco purchased Meraki and then purchased OpenDNS. You know? What is OpenDNS providing? OpenDNS is providing a secure web gateway and remote access functions with a z t n a client. Right?
Speaker 1:So, you know, those are traditionally provided by firewalls. Now they're augmenting their firewalls with these features that are cloud based. Palo Alto has Prisma. Why? You know, it's because it's where things are going.
Speaker 1:And, you know, both these companies have a challenge which is they don't want to, you know, it's the innovators dilemma. They don't want to displace their existing revenue because they're making a ton of money selling physical firewalls to organizations that are still stuck in the past. But they have to provide that upgrade path because if they don't somebody else does. And at some point, the revenue is gonna shift and the majority of revenue in these organizations are gonna come from, you know, their their cloud side and not their physical on premise side. So it is in your benefit to evaluate your resource utilization and consumption and capacity and when I say resource I I mean it's everything is at this point right you're talking budget allocation of budget physical infrastructure, hardware, electricity, space and data centers, space and racks, your telco closets, you know, asset management, people maintaining this stuff, who's gonna be on-site.
Speaker 1:If you've got an IT person getting on a plane and flying between offices because you're installing switches, you're doing things wrong. They're just it's just sorry. You're just you're doing things wrong. Because guess what? What happens if that IT person's on vacation and that office goes down?
Speaker 1:What do you what's your plan there? You don't have a plan. There is no plan. You're just gonna have a down office, and you're gonna be scrambling to figure out what to do about it. It you know these these are really bad setups you know of course you know ultimately rate resources equate to money and you know it's this isn't like a this is just the reality of the world you know and again going back to that cto earlier 12 devops people plus infrastructure $9,000,000 a year I mean you know, knew the budget number exactly in terms of what he was investing in resources, you know, to maintain that function and he wanted that team doing other things for them that actually was driving value forward for the business and was desperate to make that change.
Speaker 1:It would have been beneficial for the IT team if they'd done it. You know, this DevOps team would have been doing something more interesting, you know, and and would have provided them with more, you know, more of a career track and upward mobility. I mean, you know, what's more interesting on your resume? I maintained a CICD pipeline or I built out Kubernetes clusters on 3 continents. You know, what would you rather have, you know, on your things?
Speaker 1:Anyway, so this is long winded. Point is MSPs are good, especially good MSPs and levered properly on top of your existing infrastructure and operations can be phenomenal. They can provide you with vacation time. They can provide you with resources. They can give you augmentation.
Speaker 1:They can help you with best practices. They can get you into proper policies and procedures and processes and documentation and everything that you want, and they can free you up to do other stuff. IT people free yourself to do other stuff, especially stuff that is valuable to the business. Hi, Max. That was 20 minutes.
