Is your resNet support boat sinking?: try outsourcing!

Skidmore is a small liberal arts College with 1,800 residential students. Nearly every student has their own computer and some have more than one, so support is becoming an ever increasing challenge. With viruses, worms and spyware running rampant in the residence halls, the support burden on the help desk was increasing significantly every semester. The help desk has one full time employee (the coordinator) and nineteen student assistants. Add to this an aging infrastructure and the cost of adding packet shaping, firewalls, computer registration systems and intrusion detection, and you can see that the costs of support, both in time and hardware, was bringing us to our knees. As part of a report to the College Administration about the state of the infrastructure several alternatives were explored. One of these alternatives was outsourcing the entire student network. This paper will explore this alternative beginning with the existing support models and infrastructure. We will show the planned changes and then discuss the reality.