Does your team already have the skills required to get the job done? That, in a nutshell, is the first question you ask before you hire a technical person. But the natural follow-up question is just as important to ask: “Do we need someone in-house, or do we hire an outside IT specialist for the job?”
It’s not a new point of contention. Companies with IT departments have been dealing with it for years. Big companies need IT generalists on hand to ‘keep the lights on’: maintain servers, trouble-shoot software problems, custom-build websites and apps, etc. But as networks, software and hardware get increasingly specialized, there’s just no way for the generalist to know everything. That’s true, even for the most switched-on life-long learning enthusiast. In that case, the company will bring on highly-paid technical specialists for help on projects that are beyond their generalist’s expertise.
IT specialists and generalists, redux
Depending on who you ask, generalists are a dying breed, or specialists will soon (and just a bit ironically) get replaced by software and robots. People who are just getting into the IT field don’t quite know who to believe and face a pretty major dilemma about whether or not to specialize.
You can get great value from going with an IT specialist versus a generalist — but for some companies that are more fixated on bottom lines, cost is the biggest variable. AJ Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Alumnify, points out that “top augmented reality developers can earn up to $140,000 per year, and top PHP developers can earn up to $150,000 per year” while “entry-level developers average $33,000 to $40,000 per year.” But a simple cost-benefit analysis of a year’s salary versus a specialist’s engagement retainer won’t give you the full picture of what a specialist can do.
One of the biggest (but least-talked-about) benefits of using an outside IT specialist comes from having that safe-distance, third-party perspective. Working slightly outside the core team, the specialist can be more clear-eyed about problems, look past biases and egos and ultimately be more proactive about finding a solution.
Just to put it in perspective, here’s how we dealt with precisely this kind of challenge very recently, when a company needed our specialist expertise.
The specialist as a trusted advisor and mediator
A data loss event was escalating. It had all started with an interruption to their offsite disaster recovery service. If we didn’t move rapidly, a data loss event within the primary systems would become unrecoverable. That interruption was exposing the company to significant risk. Potentially, the event could have cascaded to result in lost production worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, per day.
The small internal IT team had expertise in internal storage and networking, but they were thinly spread and focused on keeping primary systems running. Available cycles to deep dive into Networking Protocols just didn’t exist — and that’s where the problem seemed to lie. The group started going through their protocols to figure out the issue. It looked like scheduled data replication from the main site to the backup was failing when it came to larger volume transfers. In fact, they’d first become aware of the problem after they’d upgraded the connection between the two sites, improving the bandwidth.
Soon, they went to their data storage vendor; the problem seemed to stem from a setting or configuration option within the storage application. After looking into it, the storage provider pointed their finger at a third company that was managing the network. Neither vendor seemed able to provide instant relief for the customer, and a stalemate began.
With no ready solution in sight and a risk of complete data loss increasing daily, they turned to us to investigate the issue.
The customer, a 350 person company, trusted us because we had rebuilt their network a while back after they had experienced major network constraints. We understood the technology intimately; but as importantly, they trusted us to be able to communicate with the different players, acting as a kind of liaison as well as a problem-solver. And of course, the big reason they went with SwitchedLink: because of our expertise, we could do our deep analysis in a more timely fashion.
We were then able to pin the cause to a little known yet common characteristic of high bandwidth links spanning long distances. This was influencing the behavior of the application that handled data storage replication. I won’t bore you with the details, but from this finding, we could rule out a network issue as the root cause of the interruption. In the meantime, the data storage vendor has come up with changes that they think will fix the problem.
Specialist expertise assists the generalists when they need a helping hand
In this case, the internal team would eventually have been able to figure out the problem on their own, but resources were thin, and the clock was ticking. They needed this issue analyzed by a third party who had the experience and authority to be taken seriously by both vendors, so they could keep moving forward to a solution.
No matter the company, that’s a typical situation a lot of the time when companies hire us as an outside IT specialist.
As the complexity of high-performing networks stretches the skills and patience of IT departments increases all the time, we’re here to help companies get past these hurdles, so they can focus on their core business.
Does your company need specialized network engineering services? Give us a call today
