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Almost all “on prem” business IT is managed by external contractors. I was one of them. We served about a third of the commercial premises in a small Midwestern
by closeparen 5y ago
Almost all “on prem” business IT is managed by external contractors. I was one of them. We served about a third of the commercial premises in a small Midwestern city, driving out to visit the server closet, change backup tapes, click through Windows Updates, and perhaps make the rounds of desktop users with any questions or concerns. We sold a monthly package of so many labor hours, and we’d visit each customer site about once a month. We’d get the keys from an office administrator who perhaps knew how to provision user accounts. The biggest, richest customers might have had 1-2 help desk on staff, probably not domain admins and certainly not empowered to do any decision making or design. That was for us.
It was quaint, adorable, personal, and hilariously inefficient.
- greedo 5y agoYou're talking "Mom and Pop" scale businesses that have minimal computing needs other than printing and Internet access. Most "on-prem" IT is much larger. My company (also in the Midwest) has mainframes, SANs, vSphere deployments, Nutanix, as well as supporting ~3K users.
- closeparen 5y agoThese businesses ranged from "Mom and Pop" to about 50 employees. There'd be a domain controller, Exchange server, file server, PBX, SQL server, and application servers for 2-3 line of business apps. It seems very clear to me that these kinds of businesses are much better served by cloud. No one of them is that valuable of a customer, but there are so many. Companies that are large enough to have an IT department with multiple highly skilled professionals onsite, or who could even contemplate doing a real data center (most "on prem" is in a closet), I agree is a different calculation.