Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not all contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even

Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not all contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks. This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.