An interesting distinction between Mazzio's approach and Hitachi Metals' is the service provider's degree of involvement. In Hitachi's case, the provider delivers a combination of access and equipment and manages both of these elements. At Mazzio's, only the backbone and raw Internet access are being outsourced. Mazzio's installed a VPN tunneling termination device at its headquarters that the company manages itself. However, it uses basic Internet access accounts to connect the sites and lets each store pick its own service provider.
Motives vary widely, as well.
Although many network managers just want to reduce communications costs, others want to offload management tasks and free up their employees to work on other duties. Still others seek a way to avoid dealing with personnel issues such as training and retaining workers. Every time someone was trained on a new access technology or a specific vendor's piece of equipment, they were out the door with a better offer in hand. Before You Leap One concern about outsourcing remote access, particularly when using a VPN service as an alternative to traditional modem pool dial access, is that users will not be able to get through to their service provider. Last year's horror stories of America Online's 80 percent call failure rate gave IT managers pause.