Tag: vendors

  • Select Multiple Vendors For A Reliable Foundation

    Select Multiple Vendors For A Reliable Foundation

    Recent political events in the United States have seen organizations and people “canceled” or de-platformed. While one can look at these as situations a business should avoid at all costs (getting swept into politics), it is an excellent cautionary tale. The Achilles heel of many of these organizations is a reliance on a single vendor for a key facet of their business. No one provider will ever give you the flexibility of multiple vendors.

    Vendor Lock-in

    The concept of vendor lock-in is not new. However, it has gotten fuzzy in areas like Cloud computing and businesses that are “too big to fail.” The Parler example falls exactly in this zone. They relied on Amazon AWS for their data infrastructure and went dark when Amazon decided that there was a breach of the user agreement. Your thoughts on Amazon’s actions do not save the folks at Parler from making a critical mistake. They put all of their eggs in the Amazon basket. They had vendor lock-in even though I bet they never considered it as such.

    Yes, you can point to this as a case of letting politics guide a business. However, this could happen if Amazon sold off the AWS products, or even if someone at Amazon (or within your organization) hit the wrong switch. There are countless tales of sites that went down for a period of time because of spam-blocking or other automated processes triggered by a simple mistake. You do not have to be in the news to have something shut down your access to a product.

    Multiple Vendors And Disaster Recovery

    The whole purpose of creating a DR plan is to consider what happens if you lose a key vendor or resource for any reason. It could be a natural disaster, one of Public Relations, or any other reason. The point is to address the problem of losing that resource. A good disaster recovery plan considers these events and looks to multiple vendors and their locations. Some DR plans rely on the stability a cloud provider gives you. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other providers have multiple data centers spread across the globe with redundancies built to avoid downtime. In some cases, that is sufficient. We pay these vendors money to handle our DR headaches. However, that does lock us into those vendors when we choose only one.

    Cloud To The Rescue

    One of the benefits of cloud providers is that they allow us to scale up our usage. We can have a tiny server at minimal cost and powerful ones that are costly but drive our business. Thus, smaller businesses can get some of the Cloud’s enterprise features without a high cost up-front. This same benefit should lead us to look at multiple vendors, even with the smallest of businesses. This concept also extends out beyond our server needs. We can embrace the cloud to handle many of our needs. For most businesses, this includes things like payment providers, customer communications, billing, and payroll. Many vendors want you to rely on them and will even provide attractive packages. However, make sure you understand the risks involved.

    It Is Your Data

    First and foremost, make sure any vendor agreement includes a way for you to get your data. The Parler case included Amazon, stating they would allow access to the application data and even help Parler migrate off their platform. That may save the business from immediate death. Think of what would happen if you lost all of your financial or customer data. You should ensure that any licensing includes your ability to own your data and content. There should also be language that restricts a vendor from being able to leverage or use the same. Content platforms are famous for this, including many social networks. They have language that allows them to share or use your content to promote their platform. If you get paid for that usage, then that is good. However, you could find yourself effectively funding a vendor’s marketing campaign or at least providing essential content.

    Finally, make sure you test your access to data early and often. Exports and APIs are excellent tools. On the other hand, they can change and cause data loss or impact recovery times. You might also find that you need a tool or solution to do something with that data. If you can not afford to have the migration tools in place or it is not practical to migrate data regularly, at least ensure you have a reasonable estimate of the time and cost in a DR situation.

  • Contractors or Employees? Options for Growing Your Team

    Contractors or Employees? Options for Growing Your Team

    In building a team one of the first questions that need to be answered is whether you will use contractors or employees.  Although this decision may be dictated by circumstances, it is important to recognize the pros and cons of each.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been a contractor for most of the last decade.

    Let’s look at the positives of employees first

    Loyalty used to be a huge plus for employees, but that seems to be less a factor every year.  However, an employee does still improve the likelihood of team continuity.  Employees may leave your organization, but it is more likely that contractors will move on.  This can cause a drain of business-specific knowledge.  Consequently, employees are more likely to give a return on the investment of training them on your processes.

    An employee also provides more ability for you to impact their attitude.  Never discount the productivity that can come from a happy and motivated employee.  There are steps you can take to make contractors happy.  However, you will have much more at your disposal to keep and motivate an employee.

    Contractors will sometimes talk about a partnership with their customers.  This is a good attitude to have, but at the end of the day, an employee is more closely bound to a company.  Their future is tied to the company success in a more direct manner than any contractor.  This symbiotic relationship does not guarantee everyone works together.  There are always going to be politics and personalities that drive a team.  Nevertheless, employees are at least going to have some shared benefits to come from a successful company.

    Finally, contractors tend to be project focused.  Your company may hire contractors for the long-term, but most will come in, focus on a project, and then move on.  This works for turnkey projects.  However, it is not the most efficient way to build a living, growing solution.  There are always ideas during implementation that get set aside but are valuable in future releases.

    Contractors have a different set of positive attributes

    It may seem cold, but contractors are disposable.  The investment made in a contractor should always be smaller than an employee.  Training and benefits are worries of the vendor, not your company.  A contractor should be primarily a short-term resource and it is usually easy to end a contract.  In any case, you let contractors go, but have to fire employees.  This has a lower cost no matter how you slice it.

    A contractor brings a new set of skills and experience.  Employees will have shared experience over time.  That is a strength of building a team but can also lead to a form of tunnel vision.  A contractor will have a different set of experiences and often can bring a new set of skills to the team.  They also will be on the hook to keep their skills current and marketable.  This can be a way to improve the overall skills of the team without paying for more training.

    One of the biggest strengths of using contractors in my experience is the ability to flex up and down those resources.  It is almost always easier to find another contractor than it is to hire someone.  You can also reduce contractor headcount quickly and reduce costs during slow seasons of business.  In fact, this is my most recommended approach to software development.  I recommend and have followed the process of building a core team that is small.  Once the team is in place, use contractors to handle peak or high-need times.  This keeps overall costs and commitments low while still getting work done.