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Managed services draw to the button | September 7, 2007
How the Canadian Curling Association peeled away all its daily tech tasks
By Trevor Marshall
Two hundred years ago, North America’s first formal athletic club was established in Montreal. The sport was curling. And today, as they have since 1807, Canadian curlers still throw stones, sweep them into position in the house and score points by drawing closest to the button.
But over the years there have been changes. Corn brooms were replaced by high-tech sweeping brushes. Frozen ponds gave way to expertly groomed indoor ice. And the sport’s popularity has grown exponentially; according to the Ottawa-based Canadian Curling Association (CCA), more than 950,000 Canadians now play the sport.
The CCA’s technology needs have also evolved. As the not-for-profit organization responsible for regulating the sport, the CCA operates with a staff of about a dozen people, including Glenn van Gulik, who joined the association in 2004 as manager of information technology. He is the CCA’s entire IT department.
When he arrived, most of his job involved keeping the association’s computers and network up and running. “The association had an internal mail server that was running on old software that wasn’t patched, and the chief operating officer was the first line of tech support,” van Gulik said. “She was the one who managed the mail server and handled the day-to-day computer problems, but she really had no time to do that…she was just trying to plough through.”
Typical SMB situation
van Gulik said the CCA’s situation was typical of small organizations, which often don’t have the time or money to establish a dedicated IT team or develop a strategic approach to its information technology. Darin Stahl agreed. The lead analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group said that in the past it was fairly easy for small organizations to get by, but that is no longer the case. “What’s happening now is there’s a lot more demand for specialized services, and it’s a lot more complex,” he said. “There’s collaboration, there’s BlackBerry Enterprise and that kind of mobility coming into the space, and enterprise applications are coming downstream, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions, DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) solutions, and so on.”
For the Curling Association, this new complexity required a new approach, so it contracted out these daily tasks to Primus Business Services in 2006. At the same time, the association physically moved its servers into the Primus Internet data centre in Ottawa.
Primus sales engineer and enterprise product manager Mike Prince said this type of managed services offering and server co-location does more than just help manage increasingly complex IT infrastructure. It has also become very popular as companies of all sizes attempt to ensure they’re in compliance with various regulations across North America, including the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act (also known as Sarbanes-Oxley) in the United States and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada.
“There’s a lot of pressure, because of compliance, to have a more secure environment for your data infrastructure,” Prince said. “A lot of smaller organizations just can’t put the infrastructure or the people in place to handle that sort of protection for them.”
In-house benefits
By taking advantage of managed services to handle the types of IT-related tasks common to all organizations, the CCA’s van Gulik has freed up his time for projects unique to the association, such as managing its internal network and investigating new technologies such as Voice over IP. In addition, he has developed an application to help register and schedule some 4,000 volunteers who help out at a half-dozen CCA-organized tournaments each year, including the Tim Hortons Brier (Canadian men’s championship), the Scotties Tournament of Hearts (Canadian women’s championship) and the Ford World Men’s Curling Championship. van Gulik also developed a Flash application called CurlCAST that delivers real-time scoring from these bonspiels to the association’s Web site.
“I just wouldn’t have time to even think about looking into those things if my whole day was consumed with the monotonous tasks of maintaining the network,” van Gulik said.
The association also benefits from Primus’ ability to scale servers to seasonal demands. “In the summer their servers are underused. There’s nothing happening other than a little bit of e-mail and Internet traffic,” Prince said. “But during their heavy season — when tournaments are on — we can make sure that we have proper bandwidth allocation and that the servers can handle the load.”
Are managed services for you?
The curling organization’s experience shows that even a small operation can benefit from managed services offerings. Info- Tech’s Stahl said a number of factors can tell a company it’s time to stop performing all IT functions in-house. “If I’m the CEO and I’m wondering if I have the right capabilities and the right complement in IT, then it’s time,” he said. “There are a number of issues that would drive that question in my mind. One would be if the IT staff is overstretched...if they’re not able to fold in new developments or the delivery of new services as required.”
Stahl also advises companies to look at their capital expenditures. “If your IT group is telling you that in order to take this to the next level and ensure the service- level agreements that are expected, that’s the time to examine the build versus buy avenues, to take a look at what capabilities are out there that could be rented on a monthly basis to avoid that capital cost.” At Primus, Prince said all companies can benefit from server co-location. “We’ve had customers come to us after their offices have been broken into; that’s been a real slap in the face for them,” he said. “Usually thieves don’t think of taking servers, but if they do, and there’s credit card data on there and account information and 10 years of history, how will that impact an organization and its customers? A lot of people come running when they have issues like that because it makes them realize how vulnerable they can be if their server is in-house.”
Perform due diligence
Once an organization decides that managed services are the way to go, the next question is, “what provider should I use?” Stahl said companies should shop around and assess various criteria. First, there’s the provider’s disaster recovery plan. “Have the provider describe and show you what its own DRP processes are,” he said. “Does it have a dedicated team? Does it have a process that continually examines and improves its plan, and really understands what’s going to happen?”
It’s also important to assess the provider’s operational practices. “From a small IT shop perspective, one can walk into these places and be overwhelmed by the NASA control room look,” Stahl said. “But the question is, what are their daily routines? How well managed is the place? How are its processes audited so I can examine them on a regular basis?”
Stahl adds that neatness counts in the data centre. “Anything that’s messy can trigger an outage unintentionally,” he said. “If it’s labelled and clean and tidy, I know that’s a shop that’s really paying attention to detail.”
Finally, Stahl reminds companies that managed services rely on good people. “I need to know who is working on my environment, what their skill sets are and what the turnover is — do I have consistency in my relationships?”
Where do you want to be?
van Gulik is convinced that even for a not-for- profit organization such as the CCA, the value proposition was just too compelling. “It really came down to: do we want to move ahead or do we want to stay where we’re at?” he said. “By answering that question, there was no other option than to move to managed services.
SIDEBAR
4 Questions
When evaluating a potential outsourcing provider, start with these four questions, said Info-Tech analyst Darin Stahl.
1 Is the provider’s own disaster recovery plan sufficient?
2 How well managed is the provider? Ask how processes are audited.
3 Is it neat? A messy environment is prone to mishap.
4 Is the provider’s staff solid? Look at employee skills and turnover.
SMB Archive
By Trevor Marshall
Two hundred years ago, North America’s first formal athletic club was established in Montreal. The sport was curling. And today, as they have since 1807, Canadian curlers still throw stones, sweep them into position in the house and score points by drawing closest to the button. But over the years there have been changes. Corn brooms were replaced by high-tech sweeping brushes. Frozen ponds gave way to expertly groomed indoor ice. And the sport’s popularity has grown exponentially; according to the Ottawa-based Canadian Curling Association (CCA), more than 950,000 Canadians now play the sport.
The CCA’s technology needs have also evolved. As the not-for-profit organization responsible for regulating the sport, the CCA operates with a staff of about a dozen people, including Glenn van Gulik, who joined the association in 2004 as manager of information technology. He is the CCA’s entire IT department.
When he arrived, most of his job involved keeping the association’s computers and network up and running. “The association had an internal mail server that was running on old software that wasn’t patched, and the chief operating officer was the first line of tech support,” van Gulik said. “She was the one who managed the mail server and handled the day-to-day computer problems, but she really had no time to do that…she was just trying to plough through.”
Typical SMB situation
van Gulik said the CCA’s situation was typical of small organizations, which often don’t have the time or money to establish a dedicated IT team or develop a strategic approach to its information technology. Darin Stahl agreed. The lead analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group said that in the past it was fairly easy for small organizations to get by, but that is no longer the case. “What’s happening now is there’s a lot more demand for specialized services, and it’s a lot more complex,” he said. “There’s collaboration, there’s BlackBerry Enterprise and that kind of mobility coming into the space, and enterprise applications are coming downstream, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions, DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) solutions, and so on.”
For the Curling Association, this new complexity required a new approach, so it contracted out these daily tasks to Primus Business Services in 2006. At the same time, the association physically moved its servers into the Primus Internet data centre in Ottawa.
Primus sales engineer and enterprise product manager Mike Prince said this type of managed services offering and server co-location does more than just help manage increasingly complex IT infrastructure. It has also become very popular as companies of all sizes attempt to ensure they’re in compliance with various regulations across North America, including the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act (also known as Sarbanes-Oxley) in the United States and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada.
“There’s a lot of pressure, because of compliance, to have a more secure environment for your data infrastructure,” Prince said. “A lot of smaller organizations just can’t put the infrastructure or the people in place to handle that sort of protection for them.”
In-house benefits
By taking advantage of managed services to handle the types of IT-related tasks common to all organizations, the CCA’s van Gulik has freed up his time for projects unique to the association, such as managing its internal network and investigating new technologies such as Voice over IP. In addition, he has developed an application to help register and schedule some 4,000 volunteers who help out at a half-dozen CCA-organized tournaments each year, including the Tim Hortons Brier (Canadian men’s championship), the Scotties Tournament of Hearts (Canadian women’s championship) and the Ford World Men’s Curling Championship. van Gulik also developed a Flash application called CurlCAST that delivers real-time scoring from these bonspiels to the association’s Web site.
“I just wouldn’t have time to even think about looking into those things if my whole day was consumed with the monotonous tasks of maintaining the network,” van Gulik said.
The association also benefits from Primus’ ability to scale servers to seasonal demands. “In the summer their servers are underused. There’s nothing happening other than a little bit of e-mail and Internet traffic,” Prince said. “But during their heavy season — when tournaments are on — we can make sure that we have proper bandwidth allocation and that the servers can handle the load.”
Are managed services for you?
The curling organization’s experience shows that even a small operation can benefit from managed services offerings. Info- Tech’s Stahl said a number of factors can tell a company it’s time to stop performing all IT functions in-house. “If I’m the CEO and I’m wondering if I have the right capabilities and the right complement in IT, then it’s time,” he said. “There are a number of issues that would drive that question in my mind. One would be if the IT staff is overstretched...if they’re not able to fold in new developments or the delivery of new services as required.”
Stahl also advises companies to look at their capital expenditures. “If your IT group is telling you that in order to take this to the next level and ensure the service- level agreements that are expected, that’s the time to examine the build versus buy avenues, to take a look at what capabilities are out there that could be rented on a monthly basis to avoid that capital cost.” At Primus, Prince said all companies can benefit from server co-location. “We’ve had customers come to us after their offices have been broken into; that’s been a real slap in the face for them,” he said. “Usually thieves don’t think of taking servers, but if they do, and there’s credit card data on there and account information and 10 years of history, how will that impact an organization and its customers? A lot of people come running when they have issues like that because it makes them realize how vulnerable they can be if their server is in-house.”
Perform due diligence
Once an organization decides that managed services are the way to go, the next question is, “what provider should I use?” Stahl said companies should shop around and assess various criteria. First, there’s the provider’s disaster recovery plan. “Have the provider describe and show you what its own DRP processes are,” he said. “Does it have a dedicated team? Does it have a process that continually examines and improves its plan, and really understands what’s going to happen?”
It’s also important to assess the provider’s operational practices. “From a small IT shop perspective, one can walk into these places and be overwhelmed by the NASA control room look,” Stahl said. “But the question is, what are their daily routines? How well managed is the place? How are its processes audited so I can examine them on a regular basis?”
Stahl adds that neatness counts in the data centre. “Anything that’s messy can trigger an outage unintentionally,” he said. “If it’s labelled and clean and tidy, I know that’s a shop that’s really paying attention to detail.”
Finally, Stahl reminds companies that managed services rely on good people. “I need to know who is working on my environment, what their skill sets are and what the turnover is — do I have consistency in my relationships?”
Where do you want to be?
van Gulik is convinced that even for a not-for- profit organization such as the CCA, the value proposition was just too compelling. “It really came down to: do we want to move ahead or do we want to stay where we’re at?” he said. “By answering that question, there was no other option than to move to managed services.
SIDEBAR
4 Questions
When evaluating a potential outsourcing provider, start with these four questions, said Info-Tech analyst Darin Stahl.
1 Is the provider’s own disaster recovery plan sufficient?
2 How well managed is the provider? Ask how processes are audited.
3 Is it neat? A messy environment is prone to mishap.
4 Is the provider’s staff solid? Look at employee skills and turnover.
SMB Archive
