A question we get asked all the time working in IT Operations is “Why should I pay for support from <insert vendor name here>? That’s what I pay you guys for!” This seems like a logical argument: We as a support team are your one stop shop for all things technology. When you have an issue and need help you want to have the team available that you can call and know it will all get resolved quickly and accurately without worrying about where the problem originated or how it’s fixed. You want to pay a fixed amount in salaries for resources that will get the issues ironed out and if those issues aren’t getting fixed then you just need to find different resources.
There’s good and bad news for this logic. The good news: It’s totally possible to have the team you’re looking for! The bad news: It’s going to cost you just as much (if not more) to avoid vendor support than just paying for it. At the end of the day your technology is only getting more complex. Systems change, features are added, hardware components fail, and critical systems only become more critical as the business adopts and engages them in operations. This means that your team needs to adapt and learn everything about the application or equipment to anticipate potential failures and react quickly and completely when unexpected failures occur. How does your team get to that point? Training.
The ultimate question is whether you want to invest your support dollars in training your resources or having vendors available to respond in an adequate time frame to fix issues. Often training resources becomes less cost effective as continued learning needs to be constantly pursued to adapt to changing technology, so you end up investing more to keep your resources abreast versus paying the vendor to keep their resources available. You are also impacted by availability with your resources as in order to have an effective emergency plan you likely need two or three people trained to the proper extent in order to respond at times when one resource may be unavailable.
This is ultimately where the problems arise: companies avoid vendor support options and rely on a team of people that may not always be available, may not be completely trained on every potential failure mode of a system and how to respond, or may just ultimately not want to engage in keeping up to speed on the latest changes. This leads to outages, major impacts, and more often than not tense situations where you end up paying for the vendor support in a pinch anyways.
My recommendation will usually be to avoid those potential scenarios with critical systems and have the vendors at the ready to a degree that is reasonable for operations and the support team. Most vendors will offer options in the extent of support they provide (24×7, 8×5, 4 hour shipping on parts, next business day shipping, etc.) and this is where actual savings can be achieved. Assessing these options requires risk analysis that can start with some of these questions:
- How critical is this system?
- How much time can we wait in the event of a hardware related outage?
- When a feature does not work does that halt operations?
- What about the entire solution?
- Can we invest in redundancy to avoid major impacts from failure modes?
Every system will have different answers to these questions, so every system may require a different level of support.
There may also be systems where maintaining in house support makes more sense. A very critical system may be preferred to be handled by your IT team as they understand the operations, the impact, the appropriate parties to notify, and potentially can achieve a faster turn around than the vendor. Just know that in those scenarios you’re likely going to be spending more in training for your in house resources than you would for vendor support.