1 10110 Whitepaper EMEA Saas Hassles Aug10

 

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A BREAK FROM THE ROUTINE IT MANAGERS TALK ABOUT THE PAINS AND FRUSTRATIONS OF ROUTINE ADMINISTRATION, MAINTENANCE AND UPGRADES.

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INTRODUCTION: A BREAK FROM THE ROUTINE Is your IT department spending too much just keeping the lights on? o n? If so, you’re not alone. One IT

department in ve spends more than half its time and resources on routine updates, maintenance and administration of existing systems, according to a Symantec Hosted Services survey of 123 IT managers. m anagers.   In the latest Gartner CIO Agenda research1, “IT management” was tenth in a list of the top ten

technology priorities for IT decision-makers. They want to focus on initiatives that let them deliver better capabilities for less money, such as virtualisation, cloud computing, Web 2.0, networking, voice and data communications (the top ve priorities, respectively). IT managers increasingly see their role as delivering business value rather than managing technology. According to the same research, their business priorities reect this. The top ve objectives are business process improvement, reducing enterprise costs and increasing the use of information/analytics, improving workforce effectiveness and attracting new customers. Everyone around the boardroom table shares these goals. But when you look at where IT departments actually spend money, a different story emerges. Around

90 percent goes on routine maintenance and administration costs2. Only a small fraction is available for innovation. When money is tight, it sometimes seems easier to cut this part of the budget when, in reality, smart decision-making can turn early investments in change and improvement into big savings later by reducing the long-term burden of routine maintenance.

Hosted services (also known as cloud computing, co mputing, Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) are a good example and the subject of this paper.

1 2

http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2010/01/19/le http://blogs.gartner. com/mark_mcdonald/2010/01/19/leading-in-times-of ading-in-times-of-transition-the-transition-the-2010-cio-agenda/ 2010-cio-agenda/ Gartner: IT Spending and Stafng Survey, November 2005

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EMAIL MANAGERS’ PRIORITIES What is true for the CIO is also true for email managers. They want to spend more time doing something constructive and less time on routine administration. An earlier Symantec Hosted Services survey revealed that ensuring email continuity, continuit y, preventing data loss, blocking malware, ensuring policy compliance and email archiving were the top ve priorities when it came to managing email systems and web access. No IT manager wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to spend more time applying patches,

reconguring spam lters and upgrading hardware.” Tedious, Tedious, time-consuming work distracts them from adding real value to the business and advancing their own long-term programmes.

MANAGEABILITY MANAGEAB ILITY MATTERS Smart companies look for ways to streamline routine operations. Not only does this cut costs and reduce

the wear and tear of repetitive work on intelligent employees, but it also frees up time and budget for more important work. Labour – the cost of IT staff – is the biggest cost by far. Ensuring that this cost is

put to the most productive use is the main goal of IT leadership. This puts manageability at the top of the agenda. Email and web security and management take up a disproportionate amount of time thanks to chores like:

•

Updating virus signatures

•

Applying operating system and security software patches

•

Tweaking spam ltering settings

•

Managing spam queues

•

Conguring security and content control policies

•

Recovering lost or accidentally deleted emails

•

Managing the hardware required to run in-house security, ltering, content control, archiving and continuity systems

•

Dealing with email data bloat, local .PST les, attachment de-duplication etc.

Most new initiatives require resources to implement. implement . For example, deploying new software like customer relationship management (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or even a new email server takes time. If you do it with company staff, it takes a long time because they need to continue with their ‘day  job’ of keeping existing existing systems running smoothly. smoothly. If you you bring in consultants to implement changes, it costs a lot of money and you lose some degree of control. These challenges exist within a wider context. The recession has put IT budgets under pressure and

it has withered capital budgets. In I n our last survey, we found that about a third (30 percent) of the IT IT managers we spoke to felt that their budgets were under “severe” pressure. At the same time, more than half of them (54 percent) felt that their colleagues outside the IT department failed to understand what went on ‘behind the scenes’ to keep everything ticking over. Life’s Life’s tough in the IT engine room now.

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ATTITUDES TO UPGRADING Given the potential benets of hosted services, we asked our respondents about their approach to IT investment. Just one in ve chose to upgrade to the latest version of all their software. Others ran out-of-date versions – even after vendors had withdrawn support for them – for a variety of reasons including limited budgets (25 percent), difculties taking key systems ofine to perform upgrades (15 percent) and limited IT resources (17 percent). A fair number (22 percent) just said, “If it ain’t broke, why x it?” Clearly, most IT managers would prefer to upgrade but can’t. The consequences of not keeping up to date can be serious. More than a quarter of respondents (28 percent) said that keeping old systems running wasted resources and a similar number (28 percent) reported that they missed out on useful features because they couldn’t upgrade. What these numbers don’t reveal is the opportunity cost of not using the latest technology. technolog y. Replacing labour-intensive systems with new, easy-to-manage ones saves time, stress and money. Our respondents had some strong feelings about evaluating new services. Most of them (80 percent) want a solution that is compatible with existing systems, a majority (65 percent) want new solutions to be easy to congure and manage and more than half (58 percent) want something that is easy to deploy. These requirements suggest that people have been burned by upgrades that did not meet expectations in one way or another. Certainly, our panel of IT managers rarely moved quickly to upgrade. Nearly half (49 percent) took several months or longer to evaluate new systems before deploying them.

THE HOSTED SERVICES ALTERNATIVE Routine IT work is not unimportant. Get it wrong and the business could suffer. This is why it has a sort

of hypnotic attraction. At the same time, big changes that could eliminate the routine are expensive, time-consuming and risky. No wonder IT managers keep doing the same thing.

Hosted services offer a way out of this conundrum. c onundrum. Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it.” Or to put it another way, it’s insane to keep doing the same thing and

expect a different result. Hosted services offer a better way to do many important IT tasks and, in doing so, help to make them much less time-consuming and inefcient. Gartner’s 2010 CIO Agenda analysis shows that IT decision-makers are paying more attention to ‘lighterweight’ services-based technology, including hosted services. This new technology will let them “reshape IT and its future role.” The benets of the hosted services approach include: •

Easier management. In the end, simplifying management produces big savings. With web-based control panels and no in-house hardware or software to look after, hosted services are much less of a burden.

•

Easy to deploy. Because hosted services (usually) do not require on-site o n-site hardware/software, hardware/software, they are quick and straightforward to deploy. This means that they are compatible with existing systems from day one. They can be trialled with little or no risk to the customer and can quickly start to add

value as implementation is measured m easured in days not months. Most hosted services deliver benets much sooner than traditional IT projects. In some cases, as with Symantec Hosted Services, the switchover is little more than a change in MX records. •

Matching expenditure to usage. Most hosted services charge on a per-user, per-month basis, and companies account for them as an operational cost not a capital expense (capex). As companies expand or contract, merge or divest, hosted services automatically scale up and down with them. A predictable cost aligned to usage makes budgeting more predictable. It also means that upgrades are not held hostage by short-term budget cuts.

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•

•

•

No upfront cost. Because of this business model, companies can adopt hosted services without spending large sums in advance. In an era of shrinking budgets, this is a critical advantage. No on-site hardware. Because hosted services run in the vendor’s own data centres, there is no need for expensive on-site hardware. Eliminating this equipment offers a further capex saving. No patches or upgrades to manage. Hosted services vendors are responsible for updating their own servers, keeping them patched and you automatically benet from feature upgrades as they improve their products. It’s an end to ‘big bang’ upgrades and the effort they require to deploy.

ATTITUDES TO HOSTED SERVICES Hosted services are easy to install, cost-effective to run and easier to manage. So why do so few companies use them? According to our survey, only 29 percent do. This is an improvement on 2009 when one in ve (21 percent) of large companies were piloting or using hosted services, according Forrester, a rm of analysts. Among the companies in our survey that do use hosted services, email security, anti-virus or spam ltering (15 percent), email itself (8 percent), other security services (7 percent) and CRM (7 percent) were the most popular applications.

The benets of hosted services were well understood:

BENEFIT

RESPONDENTS IN AGREEMENT

Predictable costs

18%

Reduce Red uced d over overall all cos costs ts com compar pared ed wit with h in-h in-hous ouse e alte alterna rnativ tives es

24%

Switched costs from capital budget to operating budget

17%

Easy deployment

25%

Simple ongoing management

24%

Reduced patching and upgrading

25%

Continuous service enhancements

15%

Reduced IT management overheads

30%

Less in-house hardware to look after Frees resource to focus on more important work

41% 19%

(Note: people could tick multiple options, so the percentages don’t add up to 100 percent) Among those who did not use hosted services, the most common objections centred on security (19 percent) and the desire to keep everything in-house (30 percent).

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SYMANTEC HOSTED SERVICES Symantec Hosted Services offers a range of security and management solutions that protect companies from malware, spam, inappropriate content, data loss and provide the reassurance of email archiving and continuity. All these MessageLabs services run in our data centre and share a common web-based control panel. This means that our customers get the full benets of hosted services, including easy installation, no upgrade hassles and easy, centralised management.

Deploying Email Security, Email Encryption, Web Security, Email Archiving, Email Continuity or Instant Messaging security from Symantec Hosted Services is a simple way to switch from high-maintenance in-house systems (or no systems at all) to something much simpler without any compromise in security or service availability. If anything, with advanced, patent-protected security systems, contractual service level agreements and high levels of fault tolerance in our systems, companies get a better service from us than from the in-house systems we replace.

We secure more than 6.4 billion email connections and 1 billion web requests every day for businesses of every size, universities, global corporations and governments. We have 14 data centres across four continents, two network operating centres and thousands of mail servers. Email management is what we do, and we apply the latest technology and huge economies of scale to its challenges.

The result is that IT resources are freed from routine IT tasks and diverted from expensive in-house hardware and software. This leaves more time and money available for the IT department’s real goal: supporting the business.

For more information or to request a free trial of our services, please visit www.messagelabs.co.uk

ABOUT SYMANTEC HOSTED SERVICES Symantec Hosted Services is a leading provider of hosted messaging and web security services, with over 30,000 clients ranging from small businesses to the Fortune 500, located in 99 countries. Symantec Hosted Services protects, controls, encrypts and archives communications across email, web and instant messaging. These services are delivered by a globally distributed infrastructure and supported 24/7 by our security experts. This gives a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing and reducing risk and providing certainty in the exchange of business information.

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