Good morning, all. I'm currently researching options and would like to see what others feel is the best course of action when dealing with a small business' IT solutions.

I was recently hired as IT Director for a small e-commerce business, and I'm slowly but surely evaluating our current infrastructure in order to determine what could be done to improve it. This is my first manager-level position, and at the time I do not have any staff.

Since this is a very small organization, the majority of core IT services are either hosted by an external company, or outsourced as needed. As I understand it, the position I was hired for has been vacant for about a year; the company had a database programmer whom they let go before I came on board.

Anyways, the current infrastructure is a mishmash of technology and outsourced solutions, and I'm currently evaluating the cost benefit of bringing the solutions in-house versus leaving them as they are.

So far I've discovered the following:

  • Email is provided by a third-party company. We don't use Exchange; the service is simple mail services and so is dirt cheap. We also have very little ability to administer anything with the email - there is a console to do basic tasks. At this point I'm not sure if Exchange is the best solution since I'm not sure if we would need/use the majority of its benefits.
  • We're an e-commerce business, and our web server is hosted in a data center. The staff there are very knowledgeable but all they do for us is apply updates/patches and backups. The main issue here is that I can only administer the server remotely without having to drive 30 miles to the data center. Also any major updates need to be done on-site.
  • The network itself seems to be half running on a domain. The server technology is a bit old (2000 Advanced Server) but works somewhat well, although there isn't a central file system and users keep files on their own computers. Network services are handled by a local IT services company; we basically have a standing contract with them.
  • I cannot effectively manage our software licenses. From what I've been told, a lot of the software we have were acquired in liquidation sales or the like from other businesses. This might explain some of the weirdness like running Enterprise Edition (or 2K Advanced Server) in a very small company. However, I'm concerned about licensing in general.


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Basically what I am trying to figure out is if it would be more cost-effective, long term, to bring the web server in-house, upgrade the domain server and include Exchange for in-house mail. I do not wish to have all my time eaten up by support, as my main goal is to help align IT goals with business goals and increase profit; to this end I'd probably look at keeping the existing contract for the networked services and have them perform a network evaluation.

The issue I'm running into is that I'm finding it hard to justify business reasons for doing this, apart from possibly the ease of maintenance in the case of a crisis (and maintenance, period, in the case of the email). I would like to get things in an optimal configuration instead of the current hacked-up solution (although said solution works, it doesn't work *well*), but I'm afraid it will just look like unnecessary spending.

I'm still in the process of evaluating my options and looking at the cost benefits of the two, and I would like to find out if others have been in similar situations, and what the end result was. Basically, if you're a small business owner/executive, what would be your thoughts from the business end of things (would you rather have everything centrally located but pay maintenance for IT, or let someone else take care of it? Remember that in this case there *is* an IT professional on-staff [me]), and if you're an IT professional what would be your suggested way to tackle this? I'm really trying to weigh the options before I jump in and see both sides of the coin. On one hand, outsourcing it means I don't have to worry about it myself; on the other hand it also means I can't easily fix it in the event of a crisis, and also can't set it up the (IMO) optimal way.

Any and all help, advice and suggestions are appreciated.