Managed IT Services

[Ukadder]

Hi All,

Due to my workload being too high I've been told I need to free-up some of my time and look at outsourced IT support.

Short story, I manage the IT for a group of companies I work for, between the group we have 80 desktop/laptops and 10 servers split across 4 different sites each with their own DC.

I'm looking for someone to take one or more of the sites in the group and manage the IT for it, so user issues, patching, upgrading etc.

However to get a figure to put into next years budget every IT managed company wants a face to face chat, all I want for now is a guestimate price per device and per server, and any general fee for supporting a domain environment.

Can anyone throw some figures at me? £30/device per month and £100/server per month is my current thinking. (I don't have time to go and get the quotes at this stage, so it needs to be more shoot from the hip)

 

[AHarvey]

Hi All,

Due to my workload being too high I've been told I need to free-up some of my time and look at outsourced IT support.

Short story, I manage the IT for a group of companies I work for, between the group we have 80 desktop/laptops and 10 servers split across 4 different sites each with their own DC.

I'm looking for someone to take one or more of the sites in the group and manage the IT for it, so user issues, patching, upgrading etc.

However to get a figure to put into next years budget every IT managed company wants a face to face chat, all I want for now is a guestimate price per device and per server, and any general fee for supporting a domain environment.

Can anyone throw some figures at me? £30/device per month and £100/server per month is my current thinking. (I don't have time to go and get the quotes at this stage, so it needs to be more shoot from the hip)

I know the last place I worked outsourced some IT to a local company for a remote office, 4/5 laptops, network, 2 printers. £7k for a year's cover.

You'll find most charge by size and by the hour. £30 a device per month really isn't a lot, it's what, about 3.5 hours work at min wage which you can easily do on a system with issue.

Where are the locations you need covering? It may be cheaper to just employee someone to travel between the locations and do the work themselves, especially if a lot of issues can be remotely solved. I used to love remote work

 

[Quartz]

Short story, I manage the IT for a group of companies I work for, between the group we have 80 desktop/laptops and 10 servers split across 4 different sites each with their own DC.

That's an utterly trivial workload. Or should be. What else do you do? I've looked after more than that on 1 day per week and that was over a decade ago. Perhaps you are being asked the wrong question? Perhaps you should ask, "Why is all this taking up so much time? What can I do to reduce that? How much will that cost?"

Oh, and are you sure this isn't a precursor to firing you?

 

[Ukadder]

That's an utterly trivial workload. Or should be. What else do you do? I've looked after more than that on 1 day per week and that was over a decade ago. Perhaps you are being asked the wrong question? Perhaps you should ask, "Why is all this taking up so much time? What can I do to reduce that? How much will that cost?"

Oh, and are you sure this isn't a precursor to firing you?

Hi Quartz,

Not sure I'd say 20% of a workload is utterly trivial, just ask anyone if they want to take of 20% more workload for nothing and see what reaction you get. The above takes up around 30% of my workload but the rest of my workload is where I'm wanted to do more and help grow the companies. Don't worry, I'm not in danger of being fired.

So based on supporting 80 users and 10 servers taking 8 hours a week, you would put the figure for support at £33,280/year (£80/ph used as the example)? Which is the same ballpark figure I'd come out at with my prices above.

 

[Ukadder]

I know the last place I worked outsourced some IT to a local company for a remote office, 4/5 laptops, network, 2 printers. £7k for a year's cover.

You'll find most charge by size and by the hour. £30 a device per month really isn't a lot, it's what, about 3.5 hours work at min wage which you can easily do on a system with issue.

Where are the locations you need covering? It may be cheaper to just employee someone to travel between the locations and do the work themselves, especially if a lot of issues can be remotely solved. I used to love remote work

Thanks for the info @AHarvey

2 of the locations are 2+ hours each way, the other is 1+. I'd say 90% is remote support with site visits required for new hardware mainly. £7K sounds a bit high, but doing the figures for one of the smaller companies it comes out only a bit lower. I'd thought about going for the employee route but due to the nature of the business we should scale up every now and then which is easier with outsourced support. Not sure whats easier to do, manage an employee or outsourced company.

 

[AHarvey]

That's an utterly trivial workload. Or should be. What else do you do? I've looked after more than that on 1 day per week and that was over a decade ago. Perhaps you are being asked the wrong question? Perhaps you should ask, "Why is all this taking up so much time? What can I do to reduce that? How much will that cost?"

Oh, and are you sure this isn't a precursor to firing you?

I used to manage 4 locations, 180 staff desktops/laptops, networks, printers etc and 220 remote sales consultants, that's without Active Directory or any real servers and pretty much building it up as I went. Nightmare of a company, everything was the cheapest possible or free. I had to use a Raspi with PiHole to limit internet access for the 2 call centers.

I was able to automate quite a bit but I was still pulling upto 60 hour weeks at times.

When it was smooth it was easy, but it only takes a couple of blips to throw a proper spanner in the works. A little instability in a system and my workload shot up. I was a 2-3 man role really but I had to do it all on my own.

As you say, it depends what else ukadder has going on and the general stability of the systems in place.

 

[Vince]

It seems a really small domain for outsourced IT, in fact it's similar in size to the one I manage but I have around 50 servers 100 users and 3 sites (including a colo). Im assuming you have considered outsourcing specific parts of the infrastructure and going to some kind of hybrid domain with Exchange and some other core services in the cloud? reduce overheads on your time by reducing the number of non managed services rather than employing an IT service provider to manage them?

My experience of outsourced support has never been good, they had it here before I joined and the very first thing I did was strip it all back as they were logging in and making changes just about whenever they felt like it without prior knowledge and often taking down core systems without even a note to let me know they were logging in. You can't be having that, it in itself is not manageable.

 

[Quartz]

Not sure I'd say 20% of a workload is utterly trivial, just ask anyone if they want to take of 20% more workload for nothing and see what reaction you get.

Heh!

So based on supporting 80 users and 10 servers taking 8 hours a week, you would put the figure for support at £33,280/year (£80/ph used as the example)?

I've been out of the game too long to give numbers save to say that that's approaching the cost of employing a PFY, someone who will handle the donkeywork like passwords and asset management and who you can send instead of yourself when the need arises.

It's easy to just wave your hands but you need to determine exactly what you want an outsourcer to do. And they will try to cane you on absolutely everything (uplift, extras, out-of-scope etc). Think SLAs and OLAs. Security. Your management of the outsourcer. Etc etc. And again, why does your IT infrastructure take so much of your time? You should look to see if you would be better off paying a consultant to look at your current network and detail how it can be optimised.

BTW you may indeed find that one of the key benefits of an outsourcing investigation - even if you don't end up outsourcing - is having everything documented.

 

[AHarvey]

so you're thinking £34k a year is acceptable for that work.

that's £34k for an outsource for 30% of your workload.

If the company doubles in size, it's £68k and triples, £102k

Now, if you employ someone around the £30k mark or even 2 employee's around the £17k mark which is about right for a first-line person.

They are doing the same work you do now which takes roughly 30% of your time, so if we double the workload, it's only taking 60% of their time, triple it and it's 90% of their time. but, the benefit is, it's not costing you £102k to do this. You've saved the company £68k.

The only issue with employing someone is holiday cover, but if you take 2 on for cheaper then that's not a problem

As they won't be working to capacity they can spend more time on maintenance/security/automation which should then also help lower future costs.

 

[Quartz]

Now, if you employ someone around the £30k mark or even 2 employee's around the £17k mark which is about right for a first-line person.

Cost of employment isn't just salary. There's employer's national insurance, pension contributions, management overhead, and so on.

 

[dowie]

As you say, it depends what else ukadder has going on and the general stability of the systems in place.

Should get them to buy Macs - happier users, fewer issues...

This isn't a Mac fanboy post but was what IBM (of all people!) found from looking at the data from thousands of users.

 

[Ukadder]

Should get them to buy Macs - happier users, fewer issues...

This isn't a Mac fanboy post but was what IBM (of all people!) found from looking at the data from thousands of users.

Not sure the cost of 80 Macs would sit nicely with the budget for the next year, plus we run Sage200c on 35 devices which is not Mac supported. But I get what you're saying.

Thanks for the input the rest of you, seeing £34k/year for 30% of my workload does not really make sense, possibly employing a junior might however, we won't get anyone for £17K round here but for £25K inc overheads we would get close. Maybe investing in some investigation as @Quartz said might be the first step and seeing what benefits that brings.

 

[sideways14a]

Macs are a total nightmare when things go wrong, i am fortunate (more like i engineered) a lack of them on my campus.

£80 a desktop does seem decent though, seen higher and lower figures over the years. Depends on a lot of things, servers, specialist SW used, SLA's and timescales ect.
80 odd pcs aint a lot but with travel and all that it can eat into your time. Prob best to start thinking of getting a pfy.

Have you got any helpdesk SW for all this? Might be worth bringing that into play if you aint already, take this as an opportunity to do it and make it seem like your adding value to your customers (call logs/ect)

 

[morbid42]

Hire an expert temp for the largest site, get good procedures and documentation made, replace with a grad or someone more experienced non-professionally and who want s to self study a cert in the same field

 

[Nasher]

Outsourced IT is always worse. Especially when it goes wrong.

There is the security aspect as well. People are taking it a lot more seriously than they used to (after all the rampant hacking and the Snowdon thing) and are now bringing some IT back in-house. So they actually know personally who has access to their network and not just some remote admin they have never seen.

 

[morbid42]

Outsourced IT is always worse. Especially when it goes wrong.

100000% agleed

 

[Josh]

I might be able to put you in contact with an MSP that covers a similar scope as you are looking at outsourcing, they should be able to give you a quote (without a face to face), should you want to send me a trust and I’ll forward your email to them.

 

[Energize]

That's an utterly trivial workload. Or should be. What else do you do? I've looked after more than that on 1 day per week and that was over a decade ago. Perhaps you are being asked the wrong question? Perhaps you should ask, "Why is all this taking up so much time? What can I do to reduce that? How much will that cost?"

Oh, and are you sure this isn't a precursor to firing you?

Sounds like someone who's never worked in I.T.

Back in the real world...

OP you can't expect someone to just spit out a price without knowing anything about how the organisation is setup.

 

[Quartz]

Sounds like someone who's never worked in I.T.

Twenty-five years, TYVM.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

I'll throw some figures at you but you won't like it. Not been funny but..

Short story, I manage the IT for a group of companies I work for, between the group we have 80 desktop/laptops and 10 servers split across 4 different sites each with their own DC.

Is that it? That's a small network and probably not big enough for outsourcing. It would be cheaper to hire internals I would think as long as the works been done on time. There was two of us to manage 1000 systems on one site in my job couple years back.

It's how you go about implementing things, how tickets get raised, jobs logged and what are the problems rising in your organisation, how are they fixed and is there up to date documentation. I also used to manage 8 times that what you mentioned on my own for another company.

Schedule things so minimise downtime e.t.c Stick to your promises. IT do get a bad name because of how it's managed as there really isn't any set prices for this sort of stuff.

I'm not saying this is any of your fault it could fully well be processes and procedures but without know more into someones setup they really can't do much about it. You certainly can't ask anyone to throw figures at you when they don't know your setup.

I would want to know what is going wrong and why. It may well be all of the hardware needs to be upgraded with a central management system. When I used SCCM and app-v years back I could do absolutely all sorts from one management console. 6 sites, 6000 desktops, one right click it didn't go wrong much that's for sure. (Yes there was more staff at other sites) (2/3 per site) with a central support desk to log tickets. (not saying you should use this system it was an example)

If only I lived closer to Essex.. I don't think you will get managed services for them figures you have quoted mind.