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For some businesses the burden of having an in-house service provider or IT department may be too much for the budget so a third party option needs to be considered.
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I have just discussed that the overall best way to go with your Big Data project is to start with people inside your company. However, there will be times when you will need assistance from outside vendors. It is important to show the same care and the attention you spent on choosing your Big Data team in choosing your Big Data vendor.
When working with third parties, it is important that you treat them as a temporary support. I mean, when you are receiving outside support, you cannot let them do everything for you, and you having no clue as to what they are doing. Your responsibility is to monitor them carefully, learn how they are carrying out tasks, how they are performing their jobs and to document everything. Big Data is no different.
Although I have expressed my ideas with reasons against Big Data outsourcing, there will be times when companies will need to outsource their Big Data projects. The reasons may be plenty, such as infrastructure, required investment, ROI concerns, staffing issues, budgets or some combination of these.
If Big Data is to be outsourced, I advise you to start with a pilot project. Big Data is a new area in IT and so are the contractors. The contractors will try to reap profits from the hype and will be paving ways for a long term engagement to ensure that when the hype is cooled, they will still be making money. In order to protect your interests, ask for a pilot project to evaluate the contractor. And watch out for the signs to tie you to a long term engagement. It is you, not the contractor who will decide if the contractor is well worth for a long term contract.
The contractor needs to understand your industry in detail rather than having a vague idea or with the unjustified self-confidence that his expertise in one industry will apply to yours as well. Remember that your industry is different and your company is unique and your contractor’s cluelessness is his own problem. The contractor must have the skilled personnel, the right tools and the right processes to work closely with your company. If you already have a Big Data team working and you are hiring a contractor, make sure that the contractor can deliver what your team asks. If you don’t have the dedicated Big Data team, make sure that the contractor can effectively communicate with your business-side (non-IT) personnel and deliver their requirements (rather than steering/convincing them that what he delivers is better than what they ask).
In parallel to all of these, remember that what you are outsourcing is your data, which is your company’s most valuable asset. Make sure that the contractor/vendor is tightly bound by the contract terms from legal, financial and security points of view. You will need a very detailed non-disclosure agreement because it is the key of your company that you are outsourcing. To have a better peace of mind, engage your IT security and company lawyers in the project, put control points and keep the executive management very closely informed on the matters before the data leaves your company.
One of the most neglected points in the consultancy/vendor contracts is the documentation and the training issues. Almost all of the companies act like outsourcing is a one-way relationship: when the contractor/vendor is decided, everything is their problem. But it is just the opposite. When you are giving things away, you are giving your knowledge away. If, at some point in time, you decide to take this knowledge back, and if you did not receive anything from the contractor during the period, you are left with a ticking bomb in your hands: a machine that is working, which you don’t have any clue about. To avoid such a situation, make sure that what the contractor does is properly documented and his knowledge is returned back to your company. If you have an in-house Big Data team, this knowledge will in turn contribute to your team’s level of knowledge and expertise.
If you are hiring a contractor for training purposes, there are a couple of points to check to make sure that the training will be effective:
Does the trainer have a hands-on expertise with Big Data so that he can answer your team’s scenario-based questions?
Does the training facility have the infrastructure for a hands-on Big Data training?
Does the training facility provide training for one vendor only? (This may mean that they have a rather limited – vendor-specific – perspective on Big Data.)
Does the training offered addresses the needs of your Big Data team’s requirements? (Did your Big Data team reviewed the training outline/contents?)
If you are ready to outsource your Big Data to a third party, rethink once again. How will you make sure that your Big Data project is not tied to the success of an outside organization after you have given them your company’s most valuable asset?
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Outsourcing comes in different forms, from call center to the entire data center. Now there are companies that are outsourcing their backup infrastructure; this is not moving their documents and databases to the cloud, but rather than having someone monitor backups, manage tapes etc., like a full-time backup administrator would do.
As is the case in all tasks we perform, we need to be aware of what challenges await us from start to finish. Here is my top 5 questions that I recommend my clients to ask themselves when they are outsourcing their backups.
Whether you are considering outsourcing your backup, evaluating your backup strategy or planning for purchasing a new storage system, you need to know your data growth plus your company’s growth strategy. Since backup is directly related to your data size, knowing your data in detail is your starting point. You then need to know such things like your company’s growth strategy, such as opening new branch offices, hiring more people, entering different markets, mergers/acquisitions and expanding to new business areas. Putting down everything on paper will make you see everything from a broader point of view and will make your solutions more solid, not only from a backup perspective but also for your future IT support.
In terms of outsourcing your backup, all these information will boil down to your outsourcing contract: during the contract time the contractor needs to know the size of the data, consider additional investments such as purchasing new hardware or reevaluating existing licensing terms and the like. Since you are offloading your data’s risk to another company, they need to be informed about the known future.
“What an obvious question” you may say until you face an unfit contractor. A company that has a proven track record of small and medium-size businesses does not mean that it will be successful in an enterprise.
One of my clients faced this issue when they finalized their contractor and began the outsourcing project. Immediately in the second day they were stuck because the contractor did not know about SAP’s transaction backups. Although the contractor was fit for the small and medium-size businesses taking SQL backups, they failed when the company asked them to backup SAP’s transaction logs; they did not know why or how they would take transaction log backups.
Or in another case (another client, another contractor) the contractor did not have full knowledge of Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) infrastructure. He tested an Exchange 2010 environment in his office without DAG implementation and all went fine. When he faced with 70+ mailbox databases, he could not find a working solution to backup Exchange databases for some weeks.
When choosing your contractor make sure that he understands your environment fully. As a medium-size business you do not need enterprise-level backup service or from another point of view, if you are an enterprise, you cannot work with a contractor that is only fit for a medium-size business.
The responsibility of backing up the data is enormous and it is tempting to outsource it. But know in advance that outsourcing backup is very very challenging.
“What an obvious question again” you may say; at the very least it is written on the contract isn’t it? Yes, it theoretically is, but not practically. If the contract has a clause that says the contractor is responsible for the hardware until the end of the contract and will be delivered to the company at contract’s termination, then it is the company -you- that also has a say in the hardware. At least you need to consider the reasons of such purchase, if everything is chosen just for cost purposes rather than company’s strategy, then at the termination you will be left with lower grade equipment. If your data center uses better grade equipment, you will also need to think about integrating inferior hardware to your existing infrastructure and probably with an inferior support.
On the other hand, it can be you, not the contractor, that has unfit hardware. What would you do if the contractor brings in storage systems with 10 Gigabit fiber connections where your switches cannot provide more than 4 Gigabit? Or a system with a couple of 10 Gigabit ethernet adapters and your infrastructure is stuck at 1 Gigabit? You get the idea: it is also an opportunity to evaluate every piece of hardware during the process, which you did not think about during your daily routine.
Again a seemingly obvious question that brings lots of trouble when not properly addressed. If your Exchange environment is more critical to your business than a file server (I have some clients that explicitly say this is the case) and item level recoveries are a must, then the backup software should be capable of both backing up and restoring individual Exchange items – e-mail, calendar entries, tasks, notes, contacts etc.. And if the chosen backup software is not capable of doing this, no matter what world-class enterprise backup software is that, it is not suitable for your organization.
Your vendor may not be aware of your specific requirements. Make sure that you have brought everything to the negotiation table and make sure you guide your contractor with those key issues. The contractor may choose a backup software that he thinks is enterprise class, but if it is not capable of meeting your key requirements, it is useless.
It is tempting to outsource backup; eh, why would you bother with the tedious, relentless job of managing backups, tapes, disks which brings no knowledge in return, consumes man hours, lowers productivity, puts an enormous stress on your shoulders? On the other hand, outsourcing backup is essentially giving your e-mails, files, financial data, corporate secrets to body else. You may say that the contractor agreement is bound by the terms of the contract, especially the nondisclosure part. Correct, I agree but I also say that you need to think a bit more about your data security.
How about creating a user for the contractor for backup purposes and creating another user for restore purposes? This will add another layer of security to the backup procedures and make the contractor realize that he cannot make restores without proper permissions and cannot make restores any time he chooses to.
These are the most prominent challenges I have seen when companies outsource their backup systems to contractors. What are your challenges? Hit the comments below!
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