News & Events

October 26, 2009

New to Harbour MSP, but an old-hat at data centres and managed services, Tarquin Bellinger shares his views on why managed services are a great option for any organisation that values its up-time or is cost conscious.

We’re talking today about managed services and the data centre. Why would an organisation want to outsource all or some of their IT needs?

TB: Managed services are all about helping the IT department meet the demands placed upon them by the business. Whether it’s ‘business as usual’ operations, supporting a major business change or, even worse, a major incident – the ability of an organisation to respond quickly and effectively is critical.

It’s also about reducing the cost of IT. Managed services provide incredible scale, which is sometimes out of reach to all but the largest enterprise – and at a fixed cost which eliminates those unpredictable spikes in IT expenditure when something goes wrong.

So it’s primarily about speed, cost, and quality of service. What are some of the other pain points of not outsourcing?

TB: It’s when things start to go wrong with your IT infrastructure – when something doesn’t do what it said it should on the label. That’s when you start to feel the pain and wish you had an expert in a particular field.

The cost and difficulty of attracting and retaining enough good people across every technology area makes it prohibitive for all but the largest companies. Smaller companies have the same IT requirements – but simply cannot afford to hire the breadth and depth of experience in every discipline.

Then there are the demands of a constantly evolving IT space. One of our leading engineers, with a brain the size of a small planet, says that even he struggles to keep up with the pace of change – and that’s his job.

How does Harbour MSP address these issues?

TB: We like to give our customers the option of not having to DIY. We ask questions: “Where can we take away an operational headache, or save some time… or save an investment?”

Because we service hundreds of customers, we can afford to employ the specialist engineers and the technology experts… the leaders in the field.

Our customers – which are typically organisations with 100 to 1000 seats – have to support all of the systems that large enterprises support, but don’t necessarily have the budget for a large IT team.

So we provide design advice early in the relationship, we proactively monitor services, and we provide on-going advice through regular service level reviews on how to improve service levels and the end user experience.

Cloud computing is the latest buzz-word in IT. What are you doing ‘in the cloud’ at Harbour MSP?

TB: Excuse the pun, but there’s a lot of fluff around cloud computing. It’s a small word that means different things to different people – so it’s important for customers to understand what they’re getting from a service provider when they enter the ‘cloud’, as well as the associated operational risks.

Harbour MSP has identified one area within the broad ‘cloud’ spectrum where we can deliver real benefits to customers. We offer utility IT services which can be purchased on-demand from a shared platform, while still maintaining the highest levels of security and quality of service.

Example services include utility tape back-up, storage and firewalls. Customers simply rent the amount of space they need… why buy a whole one if you only need a tenth of it?

Going forward, we’re also offering a pre-packaged disaster recovery / business continuity service (DR in a box) – but this is something that’s still being developed.

This sounds interesting. Can you explain ‘DR in a box’ further?

TB: We’re working on this because, for a lot of our customers, it’s too expensive to build their own disaster recovery / business continuity site. Yet business continuity is just as critical to them as for large enterprises.

So we offer a pre-packaged utility server, storage and platform that is constantly updated with a copy of the customer’s production site. If there is a disaster at the customer’s production site, we fire up the DR/BCP site and their staff can log in from home, another business site or an Internet café.

With this cloud offer, customers reap all the benefits of a disaster recovery site – including things like compliance – at a fraction of the cost.

What else is new at Harbour?

TB: We’ve just launched high density co-location suites for organisations that need to reliably operate large scale blade server or storage environments requiring power up to 12kW per rack.

Even more exciting is the opening of our Singapore Data Centre in January 2010 – and we are already lining up a number of customers. With a base in Asia, our customers will now be able to enjoy the same level of quality and consistency between their Australian and Asian IT infrastructure. It also allows us to back up and archive customer data off shore where required.

Given your global experience, what can you say about where Australia’s at compared with the US and UK?

Australia is as technically advanced as any Western economy. Perhaps the only difference is that there is more of a migration away from DIY to managed services overseas.

For example, one of my biggest UK clients, which had a few hundred employees in its IT department, decided to outsource all of its client-facing services. They had been trying to manage so many stacks of technology – they knew they couldn’t give each one 100%.

By outsourcing the client-facing component, they’ve improved the customer experience no end and virtually eliminated the cost of failure from the equation. Plus, all their IT staff still have their jobs but are being channeled into more interesting and productive work. It’s a win-win situation.

I know there is the saying, ‘Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas’. But to see IT managers make the decision to outsource part of their technology requirement – well, that can be a really strategic and sensible business decision.