How do you make decisions about choosing between building in-house solutions and leveraging external platforms or services?
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How long does your organization retain original systems logs used to filter SOX-related actions into a system that requires review of the logs and retains the filtered logs for seven years? Does your organization consider those original system logs records subject to record retention requirements, or supporting information used to create the SOX records?
90 Days14%
365 Days36%
3 years33%
5 years7%
7 years10%
Other (share in the comments)
How do you maintain alignment with your CEO on IT strategy and investment priorities? What's been most effective in building credibility as a strategic partner?
Strongly Agree29%
Agree62%
Disagree11%
Strongly Disagree1%
Clients hire us to do the maintenance and support of their environments, though we do a lot of project services for them as well. It’s a tough question for us because we've outsourced to ourselves and that was a very deliberate decision. I presented it to our executive team just before COVID: why not use ourselves to support ourselves? The rationale was that the clients are the ones with all the governance in place and they're the ones that have 24/7 teams, so our patching regime will actually improve a lot and we will have better coverage outside of normal business hours. We can actually build that into the contract with the Integrated Global Services team. What we've learned in the meantime is you can't be an expert on everything. When you try and do it all yourself, you need to be cognizant that your team needs to learn and they're not always going to get it right — you have to be comfortable with that.
One of the things that we use from a planning perspective (that actually comes from Gartner) is to look at the initiative as a product, not a project. When you treat it as a product, you must include the day two support and total cost of ownership needs to factor into your cost. It isn't just about licensing, infrastructure acquisition and deployment. Look at it as you would when you buy a car: there are factors other than the car itself to consider, like the gas and maintenance.
When we started looking at some of the more sophisticated systems we’re putting in now, it was less expensive for us to use that manufacturer’s management service to do the support. It’s about economics and facing the brutal fact that you don't have the skill today to maintain that system. Do you really want to be learning on your own dime? In some cases, because our teams are so busy with client work, they don't have time to help us if it's outside of our core team’s wheelhouse. So when I'm deploying a new DLP solution or new PAM solution, I have to consider whether they have the skill and if they are available. If not, I go back to the company that I'm sourcing the DLP solution from and ask if they can do it. In a lot of cases, they can and it's less costly.