Is your organization searching for IT Incident Management software? If so, you might be considering whether it's more beneficial to develop your own. This blog delves into key factors to help you decide whether to build or buy an IT Incident Management tool.
When your organization identifies the need for an Incident Management System (IMS), the initial question usually is, “Should we build or buy?” On the surface, the requirements seem straightforward, and being a tech-savvy organization, you likely possess the necessary skills. With a thorough understanding of your internal setup, building a tailored IMS might seem appealing. However, there are hidden aspects you may not have considered. In this blog, we explore the costs associated with developing your own IMS and assess whether the return on investment (ROI) justifies building one.
Let's first examine some benefits of developing your own IMS.
The primary advantage is the ability to create an IMS that perfectly matches your requirements. For instance, if your organization doesn't use Sensu, there's no need to build support for it. Instead, you can directly integrate with your existing on-premise monitoring tools. Moreover, if you restrict access to your production network, a commercially available SaaS IMS might be challenging to use. An internally developed IMS wouldn't face such issues.
While these benefits are significant, it's crucial to also consider the drawbacks.
Budgeting for an In-House Incident Management System (IMS)
When building your own IMS, estimating the total cost of ownership can be challenging. Typically, it's easier to obtain approval for a one-time expense than for an ongoing project. The difficulty with developing an IMS is that the costs often exclude long-term maintenance, usability, and reliability.
Securing budgetary approval for the IMS can be difficult, as the benefits are often qualitative rather than quantitative. Although the on-call experience and engineer efficiency will likely improve, these benefits are hard to quantify. Convincing management to increase the budget over time as new features are needed can be tough. Many organizations lack the measurement tools to clearly demonstrate the ROI. You might create a dashboard to track MTTR (Mean Time To Respond), but without historical metrics, convincing management can be a hard sell.
Conversely, off-the-shelf IT Incident Management software generally doesn't have high upfront costs and requires less commitment. Running a small pilot of a commercial product is often easier to justify than embarking on a lengthy and potentially expensive development project.
When deciding whether to build or buy an IT Incident Management tool, it's essential to weigh the unique benefits and challenges of each approach. Building an IMS allows for a customized solution but comes with hidden costs and ongoing maintenance needs. On the other hand, purchasing an off-the-shelf IT Incident Management software can be more cost-effective and easier to implement initially. Carefully consider your organization's needs, budget, and long-term goals to make the best decision for your Incident Management strategy.
But is it, in fact, expensive? Let’s break it down:
Development Costs: This includes the expense of allocating programmers to the project, acquiring the necessary tools to build the IT Incident Management software, and setting up the infrastructure for testing and deployment. With a clear list of features, estimating this cost becomes feasible, and securing funding for these expenses is relatively straightforward.
Maintenance Costs: Like any other software, maintaining an IT Incident Management tool incurs ongoing costs. These include fixing bugs that emerge during the development and usage of the IMS. Additionally, as your requirements evolve—whether through changes in production applications, databases, vendor tools, or other dependencies—you'll need to allocate funds accordingly. Maintenance also involves applying security fixes to keep your system safe from newly discovered vulnerabilities. In some cases, you might need to hire external contractors to ensure your security measures are robust.
Given that an IT Incident Management software is a mission-critical component, responsible for alerting you to infrastructure problems, neglecting its maintenance isn't an option. Delaying patches or critical fixes is not viable, necessitating a dedicated and continuous engineering effort for the IMS upkeep. Even if managed by a part-time team, someone must always be available to address urgent issues. This ongoing commitment to maintenance is likely to be your most significant and challenging expense.
Opportunity Cost: This hidden cost is harder to quantify. Developing your own IT Incident Management tool diverts engineering resources from other important areas of your organization. The engineers working on the IMS could otherwise be contributing to your organization’s core products and services.
Now that we have examined the cost of developing your own in-house platform, let's consider the expenses associated with opting for an off-the-shelf IT Incident Management tool.
Factors to Consider for an Off-the-Shelf IT Incident Management Software
Typically, off-the-shelf platforms are more costly to develop because they must offer a broader feature set and the ability to scale to a larger number of users. However, you only pay a fraction of that cost since it is distributed among all the product's customers. If you have a small team, many IT Incident Management tools offer numerous features at no cost. Generally, for a specific feature set, the cost of acquisition is significantly lower with off-the-shelf systems.
Deployment and Training Cost: While off-the-shelf systems are generally quite adaptable, you may need to invest time and effort to align your processes with the new IT Incident Management software. This might involve modifying some of your procedures or phasing out old, unsupported monitoring tools. Additionally, training costs for your organization's users must be factored in.
Usability and Features: Due to the competitive nature of the market, any off-the-shelf IT Incident Management tool must continuously evolve to avoid falling behind. In-house platforms often cease development once basic functionality is achieved and can suffer from poor usability since they are built ad-hoc by SREs without UX professional input. A superior user interface leads to greater efficiency and ease of use. External products, used by hundreds or even thousands of users in other organizations, typically offer a highly optimized layout. Furthermore, an external platform comes with the advantage of a customer support team to address any queries not covered by the support documentation.
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Conclusion
When considering the costs and benefits of having an in-house versus an external system, it becomes clear that, unless you operate at the scale of Google or Facebook or run an esoteric system incompatible with external tools, investing in an in-house IT Incident Management platform makes little sense. Hidden costs, compliance, and support issues often outweigh the benefits. For most organizations, whether they have a growing or small SRE team within a large organization, an off-the-shelf IT Incident Management tool is significantly more desirable. The return on investment for most organizations is not substantial enough to justify the planning and development of an in-house IT Incident Management system.
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