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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? If so, you’re not alone. One IT
department in five 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.

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 five priorities, respectively).

IT managers increasingly see their role as delivering business value rather than managing technology.
According to the same research, their business priorities reflect this. The top five 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, Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) are a good example
and the subject of this paper.

http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2010/01/19/leading-in-times-of-transition-the-2010-cio-agenda/
1

Gartner: IT Spending and Staffing Survey, November 2005

2

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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, preventing data loss, blocking malware, ensuring policy
compliance and email archiving were the top five 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,
reconfiguring spam filters and upgrading hardware.” Tedious, time-consuming work distracts them from
adding real value to the business and advancing their own long-term programmes.

Manageability 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 filtering settings
• Managing spam queues
• Configuring security and content control policies
• Recovering lost or accidentally deleted emails
• Managing the hardware required to run in-house security, filtering, content control, archiving and
continuity systems
• Dealing with email data bloat, local .PST files, attachment de-duplication etc.

Most new initiatives require resources to 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 systems running smoothly. If 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 our last survey, we found that about a third (30 percent) of the 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 tough in the IT engine room now.

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Attitudes to upgrading

Given the potential benefits of hosted services, we asked our respondents about their approach to
IT investment. Just one in five 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), difficulties taking key systems offline to perform upgrades (15
percent) and limited IT resources (17 percent). A fair number (22 percent) just said, “If it ain’t broke, why
fix 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. 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 configure 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. 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 inefficient.

Gartner’s 2010 CIO Agenda analysis shows that IT decision-makers are paying more attention to ‘lighter-
weight’ services-based technology, including hosted services. This new technology will let them “reshape
IT and its future role.” The benefits 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 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 in days not months. Most hosted services deliver benefits
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 benefit 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 five (21 percent) of large companies were piloting or using hosted services, according Forrester, a
firm of analysts.

Among the companies in our survey that do use hosted services, email security, anti-virus or spam
filtering (15 percent), email itself (8 percent), other security services (7 percent) and CRM (7 percent)
were the most popular applications.

The benefits of hosted services were well understood:

Benefit Respondents in agreement

Predictable costs 18%
Reduced overall costs compared with in-house alternatives 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 41%
Frees resource to focus on more important work 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 benefits 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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