RoseRyan was recently the victim of a bizarre crime: thieves stole the main circuit breaker for the entire building. We lost all power for almost an entire week while the repairs were made.
Ask yourself: if my building lost power for a week, what would the impact be?
If this had happened to us three years ago, we would have been dead in the water—no email, no file sharing, no telephones, no web presence. We would have been reduced to phone trees to tell our employees about the disaster.
As it turned out, we lost only landline phone service and a scheduling system. Not that this wasn’t painful—it was. But it could have been much worse. How were we able to sustain most of our critical business applications without power? We had outsourced most of them already.
No small company can afford the redundancy that larger companies can. Having geographically separated backup systems just isn’t in the picture. But Google has them. So does Box.com. By outsourcing to companies like these, small businesses can pool resources and enjoy economies of scale that give them access to services that once only larger companies could afford.
Enterprise Gmail is one such big win for us. If we had still been using our own Microsoft Exchange server, we would have been dead—business would have stopped for the week. Not only did Gmail save the day in an emergency, but also all the day-to-day headaches that accompany email management have gone away because we let the experts handle it. If you run a small company and you’re still hosting your own email server, you’re making a huge mistake. You’re paying too much in staff time, equipment and licensing while getting too little in return.
Admittedly, outsourcing is not a panacea. You have to do your homework. Outsourcing to a poorly run company can be worse than doing it yourself. Part of the reason we still have our own phone system is that I haven’t found an outsourcing vendor that I am happy with. But think of it this way: by prioritizing outsourcing you make it a strategic problem to be solved instead of an ongoing tactical issue. As a rule of thumb, the more strategic you can be, the better off you are. Make the big decisions and stick to your core competencies. We aren’t an email hosting company, so we shouldn’t be doing it if at all possible.
The hard part is letting go of some control, but you have to get over it. Google does our email, and we have to trust them with a critical business system. Knowing we had email even when our office had no power was much more comforting than a false feeling of control.
The bottom line is this: find companies you can trust and outsource as much as you can.
You don’t cut your own hair, do you?
Author Matt Lentzner is RoseRyan’s IT guru (as you may have guessed).
