The question of using an outsourcing company to support your servers has long been a heated debate. On one hand, there are companies that have had negative experience concerning this matter. For them, remote admins are associated with a careless attitude to the system, slow work, delayed responses, and showing no interest in the success of the client’s business. On the other hand, many large companies use the services of outsourcing system administration; they are absolutely satisfied and successfully increase their profits. However, you will rarely hear about a positive experience of outsourcing DevOps services. Imagine, though, that you have found a small service company that solves a whole bunch of your problems, would you want to tell the whole world about it?
Case study
The head of one big company came to us with a problem. Their system administrator, who had worked successfully for several years, became seriously ill. Because of this, he had to immediately leave work, and the company needed to urgently find a replacement. Of course, they failed to quickly hire the right employee, because the process of finding such a specialist may take several months. At that time, there was no one to do the work of a system administrator, and the situation in the company became nearly critical. The head of the company contacted us, we accepted the system for service, and for more than two years this company has been one of our happy clients.
Such situations are not uncommon. Vacation, illness, resignation, and other life circumstances – all this creates difficulties in working with an office system administrator because sysadmin is often an irreplaceable employee, usually, no one in the company can do his job. Besides, the search and training of a new system administrator, if such a need arises, will take a lot of time, and require additional costs.
Lack of competence in various topics is also a common problem among full-time system administrators. It is difficult to find a highly qualified specialist for this position, and if you do, you’ll have to pay them a really good salary to keep them. On the other hand, a full-time employee works on the same project all the time and doesn’t gain much experience. Due to this, he may not be able to always find the best and most profitable technical solutions.
Why use DevOps services outsourcing?
If you have in your company a team of highly experienced DevOps engineers, who are likely to work only a few hours a week but receive a high salary, and in case of an accident will quickly restore the functioning of the system at 3 a.m., then your system is safe, and you won’t need to outsource system administration.
Otherwise, outsourcing will be a very good decision. For those who do not have a team of highly qualified admins on staff, I will list some of the advantages that you will get by finding a good outsourcing company and putting the weight of your system onto their shoulders:
- For the payment equal to the salary of one admin, you’ll have a team of qualified specialists working with your system. This will make it possible to maintain the system efficiently and without interruptions. Even if one member of the team gets sick or resigns, another team member responsible for your project will always be there and will answer you.
- Specialists will set up full monitoring of the project, security, backups, and optimize the architecture. Thus, many problems will be solved before they could interrupt the operation of your system. The uptime of the resource will increase, and, accordingly, your profit will increase.
- In a good outsourcing company, the response time limit to an urgent client request is a few minutes. Each problem is resolved promptly, and you will have 24/7 emergency support.
- Selecting and hiring system administrators, their training, salary, vacations, any personal issues are no longer your problem and do not affect your business.
- With a good DevOps outsourcing company, your system is completely safe. They select the specialists very carefully testing them regarding their professional skills and human qualities so that they can be trusted with clients’ systems and data.
Using the services of a good outsourcing company, you entrust your system to highly qualified specialists and this is a great step towards growing your business even more and increasing your profits. Since the cost of such services is usually equal to (and sometimes even lower than) the salary of a full-time system administrator, you lose nothing, but, in most cases, you get a far better service.
How do I choose a good outsourcing company?
Obviously, not all outsourcing DevOps companies offer high-quality services. How to choose a reliable one? Here are the points to consider when looking for an outsourcing company to support your system:
- Clients, recommendations and company image. Pay attention to who the clients of this outsourcing company are, and what feedback they give about the cooperation.
- Qualification. Examine the company’s portfolio, the number and complexity of completed projects, the results they achieve.
- Company’s priorities. Pay attention to what goals and rules are set in this company, whether the interests of the clients are put in the first place.
- Communication with admins. Clarify how your team will communicate with administrators, how promptly they will answer to your messages, and how quickly your tasks will be solved. Check if there will be 24/7 emergency support
- How much you will be paying. Find out exactly which services are included in the monthly rate and which are paid separately. There should be no hidden fees that you will learn about after the cooperation has started.
- Check if you can trust the admins. Ask about the process of hiring employees in this outsourcing company. What tests they pass and why you can trust them with your servers.
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