IT outsourcing and support

Support starts with an inventory, not a ticket queue. While nobody knows how many machines exist, who holds which privileges or where the backups live, support is only firefighting. The first deliverable is a map: workstations with serials and remaining warranty, a network diagram, accounts and licences, every password in a vault.

Then the estate is maintained as one thing. Workstations: OS and office software, antivirus, disk encryption, onboarding and proper offboarding. Mail and domain: your own zone with SPF, DKIM and DMARC so company mail stops landing in spam, plus two-factor authentication on management and finance mailboxes. Network: routing, Wi-Fi, VPN, guest Wi-Fi segmented away from accounting.

• Workstations: OS, office software, antivirus, encryption, joiners and leavers
• Mail and domain: DNS zone, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, two-factor authentication
• Network and servers: Cisco, MikroTik, Ubiquiti, VLANs, VPN, Proxmox or VMware, UPS, Zabbix
• Backups on the 3-2-1 rule, restores tested; licensing and renewals
• User support: tickets, remote sessions, site visits

An SLA is a table, not a line reading «we respond quickly». We grade tickets by consequence, not by how agitated the caller is. Critical — a core service is down: no internet, the 1C server dead, the till will not open a shift. High — a department cannot work. Normal — a slow laptop or a printer that will not install.

Each class carries two clocks: response time, when we have picked the ticket up and spoken to you, and resolution time, when the work runs again. Conflating those is where most disappointment with outsourcing comes from. We also write down what usually goes unsaid: service hours, the cost of working outside them, escalation and call-out terms.

• Tickets graded by consequence, not by volume of complaint
• Service hours, escalation and call-out terms written into the contract
• Monthly report on tickets; response targets fixed in the contract

The comparison worth making is not a sysadmin's salary against our invoice but total cost against total coverage. Add payroll taxes, holiday, sick leave, training and tooling. And one person cannot cover routing, virtualisation, mail, 1C, access control, CCTV and tills at once — strong at one, weak at four.

Then the bus factor. When a single person holds the company together, the passwords, diagrams and ISP arrangements live in their head; they leave, and you spend a month regaining access to your own infrastructure. Here it all sits in a system a second engineer — and you — can open.

Honest about the limits: with five people and one printer a retainer is dearer than paying per call-out, and we will say so. Above roughly fifty seats a hybrid usually wins — your person on first line, us on second. Outsourcing does not replace a CTO.

The early weeks go on documenting more than repairing: an equipment inventory with serials and warranty, a network diagram showing the VLANs that exist rather than those drawn at installation, backups verified by restoring them. A backup never restored is not a backup, it is a hope.

Alongside runs a short list of fixes that pay back fastest: strip local administrator rights from ordinary users, enable two-factor authentication on mail, move the video recorder and access-control panels off the office LAN into their own segment — they sit for years on factory passwords, reachable from the internet — and add ISP failover.

Support in Tashkent runs into local realities. Power: dips and outages make a UPS mandatory, and server-room runtime is sized for a clean shutdown, not for riding out a flicker. Connectivity: one ISP is one point of failure, so a second circuit with automatic failover belongs in the design. Parts and warranty repairs take longer here than anyone likes.

The real difference is scope. i7 Team installs the networks, access control, CCTV and tills itself, so one contract covers the accountant's PC, the turnstile at the entrance, the Hikvision or Dahua recorder in the server room and the till on the shop floor — with no arguing between contractors when the till stops printing because the network dropped.