From Outsourcing to Selective Sourcing: Considerations for Sharing the IT Load Through Flexible Managed Services for Storage

A significant percentage of the Fortune 500, including GM, Proctor & Gamble, Blue Cross, and Xerox outsource their entire IT departments to a third party. Most cite the same reasons: outsourcing IT allows them to focus with less distraction on their core businesses, create a more predictable cost structure for IT services, and reduce the legal risk and expense of regulatory noncompliance, incomplete backups, slow or ineffective disaster recovery, unplanned downtime, spotty data availability, escalating storage costs, and other characteristics of inefficient IT environments. This paper focuses on the five most compelling attributes of selective sourcing, and discusses some behind-the-scenes considerations that factor into any evaluation of a shared storage management model.