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Hello Everyone,

My company is currently very unhappy with our current managed services provider. They are difficult to manage, rarely thorough, and take far too long to complete basic tasks. Considering how competitive the market is for MSPs in our area, we are not going to settle.

But it has occurred to me that, as a small education-oriented non-profit with a very strong culture and mission, having a person on as in-house IT staff might be a better fit for us in the long-run. I figure that having a real in-house IT pro, rather than an MSP, would result in more thorough work, accountability, and real vision for IT rather than just waiting for things to break.

What are your takes on having a managed services provider versus in-house IT? Can a small company of 50 employees get by with just one or two in-house IT professionals, or is the bandwidth/value-add of a managed services provider just too good to beat for a company this size?

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I want to say yes, depending on the volume, network, servers, difficulties to manage, etc, even 1 person should do just fine. But again depends what you do, what is in place and what is needed.

The main reason to go with an MSP is usually they can keep up with higher volume and an MSP is supposed to have more well ‘subject matter experts’ who know more things than a single jack of all trades.

Having that said, it’s back to your business, your budget and your needs, if in house would make more sense than an MSP.

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That’s the general feeling I am getting. Our network is fairly simple: 1 server, 1 firewall, 2 switches, 1 allworx PBX, 4 ubiquiti access points. On the user side, we have I think 51 right now, but it fluctuates. They all have lenovos, except for a few dell xps 13s.

From what I’ve been learning, and from my own gut, one person could handle all this. I am curious if any small companies are going in-house, since it feels to me like every company our size has an msp.

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One person can probably handle it, but then you need to factor in absence such as holidays and how to ensure that one person still has a life.

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Is IT critical to your business success, or a core competency of what your doing? If not, I’d still go MSP.

I worked with schools for a MSP, and we were able to deliver accountability (There were SLA’s and we did quarterly review of our SLA’s), A MSP has more skills and can do things more effectively (a low salary internal resource doesn’t know he’s not fixing a problem), and accountability is better with MSP’s as they have ticket tracking and SLA systems, while in house staff is harder to fire, and often just sitting around for things to break…

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Our company is essentially a school for people who want to open schools. We have marketing people who work with adobe products, but mostly everyone is just using office365 on their company laptops and their company voip phones.

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I am a one man shop and currently manage a SAN with a 3 host cluster and 10 virtual servers, 100+ users, 5 locations in two countries, phone, fax, and everything else under the sun.

You should have no problem finding someone to fill the role in house.

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Sounds boring. I work for a slightly larger company: 8 Servers, 1 firewall, 9 switches, NEC PBX, 2 AP’s, 45 users on a 10-acre manufacturing shop. Most days I am pretty bored around here. I was brought in to replace the MSP. I do give what the MSP can not; which is vision. I have taken the time to make things right, such as finally removing Admin rights from workstations. I’m also being trained to take over the EDI management from the CFO. I can’t image how fast I would run out of things to do in your environment. Maybe you just need to find the right MSP to help out.

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You need to do a realistic side-by-side comparison of the options. If you could find a more responsive MSP, would that solve your issues? Or are there things in your setup that really need someone on the ground? (It sounds like not.) In our case we have specialist apps (ERP/CRM) that an MSP would never deal with. Even without those there can be a big comfort factor in having someone physically there.

If I were in your shoes I’d probably just be looking for a better MSP because even a relatively high monthly cost for a premium service would probably add up to less than a local employee. And as someone else said - that lone IT guy needs holidays.

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10

I think the dilemma is that it sounds like a reasonably entry level position, I could be mistaken.

That may mean you get someone keen and eager so the boredom factor may not be so much of an issue, but will the insight/knowledge/vision be there?

That’s where having access to some kind of external resource, and I’m not going to necessarily say an MSP, may be useful.

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Now that we are getting really specific to my company, I will say that we do need to upgrade our server and deal with our file system, which is a bit of an unorganized mess w/ security groups etc.

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Based on this description, you don’t need 2 IT pros, unless you need redundancy. I personally handle a similarly sized IT firm though our back end is quite a bit more complicated. in 12 years we’ve only had a single IT admin (me). You may even be able to get away with a Part-time IT pro.

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Thanks for all the feedback guys! I really appreciate it.

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Maybe your new improved MSP (or another consultancy firm) could do those kind of improvement projects.Maybe it would help clarify things if you continue this process of getting really specific in order to draw up a “job description”, without getting hung up on whether it’s a job for an employee, a service company or both. When you do that it may become clearer as to whether there’d be enough to occupy an employee (and keep them interested). Or you might come up with a combination of part-time employee plus MSP…

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Sounds plenty small enough for one person to handle, maybe you’ll want a part timer even to help with their work/life balance, but it sounds like a decent gig to me. My personal feeling is that the in-house employee would have a greater vested interest in improving the situation, whereas the MSP gets paid based on the contract, and they could feel like their customers will pay more if things are broken. But, a bad employee might think like the MSP example I just gave, and vice versa.

Long story short, it seems a bit like 6 of one, half a dozen of the other, as long as you get the best candidates of either category to take the job. Which one is easier for your company to manage?

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If you go for an “MSP in your area”, you have already settled. MSPs are not a local service.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/08/avoiding-local-service-providers/

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Which means you can’t use in house in any reasonable way.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2013/02/the-smallest-it-department/

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Everyone needs more than two, everyone. Unless you are just a hobby. But even then, you don’t waste the money on two people doing “everything”. That will cost too much and provide too little. You always need multiple people, normally part time each, to even have the possibility of being effective. With only one person there is no way not to overpay and underproduce.

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Yup, a good MSP with a reasonable price is always cheaper. If there is any thought that an MSP will cost more, something is very wrong. Probably because people compare big MSP services to one lonely IT guy doing far less. Apples to apples, a good MSP has to be cheaper, simple economics force this until you are into thousands and thousand of employees and even then, in house is only cheaper some of the time, even in the Fortune 10, in house isn’t always cheaper.

But in the SMB market, MSP is always more cost effective as a model. But just like hiring internal staff, you still have to hire a good MSP.

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I’m sure that the right person can handle it. But will bring risk (holidays, sick days, needs to sleep, might move on, can demand unlimited salary increases as they hold all knowledge, etc.) and will cost a fortune because they have to be a jack of all trades and you have to pay for their top skill(s) even when they are idle or doing low end work. And anyone that is any good would have so much opportunity to move on to some place that can leverage their skills and pay twice as much that you incur high turnover OR get stuck with low end people.

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