Perilous Outsorcery · Chapter 7 277 The perils of AV outsourcing are thus almost always organizational by nature, and are based on human factors. Outsourcing AV means that people from different companies with independent management, different missions, different cultures and varying experiences have to start to work together to manage a complex and dynamic security domain. Next, your personal success will depend on how quickly you can spot any imbalance in this crucial customer-vendor relationship with respect to each outsourced activity, and how quickly you can make stabilizing adjustments to counter such imbalances. For that purpose, we present later on a Roles and Relationships (R&R) matrix, as well as a questionnaire to be adapted for use with respect to your own organizational changes. Why Do More and More Companies Outsource AV Services? Given the problems cited above, it is not obvious why companies want to outsource some or all in-house AV activities and infrastructures, and decide to make room for a third party. But more and more companies do so because: It offers better control over most AV activities. By managing vendor(s) using formal contracts and services, management can be freed from dealing with many technical details, while retaining overall control. It makes economic sense. Customer companies are buying because the outsourcing company is selling the idea that it will cost them less than keeping an in-house team active (at least, that's the management theory.) Managers like the idea of managed AV services in just the same way as they like paying for clean water, 24/7. By analogy to an infection with dirty water from a badly maintained source (instead of clean water), the decision to outsource AV looks like a no-brainer. The argument is that the costs of seeking new sources and maintaining pipes are too high for a normal company. But harmful code is associated with virtual risks, and is not particularly like water provision. Pollution incidents are very common, their causes are not ultimately curable, and losses are unpredictable and much more dynamic. If water providers were liable to problems comparable in variability, frequency, and impact, there would be far fewer of them. It offers more flexibility. Selecting a service provider, and allowing the vendor to deal with delivering AV services or functions in its own way, allows both the customer and the vendor to operate more independent of actual locations. As countries where labor is available at low cost are sometimes politically less stable, switching to another region at need is now possible, and it is easier to replace a team that fails to meet SLAs or to perform, provided that AV services are not dropped when new competitors are invited.This benefit relates also to the OODA cycle we referred to previously. www.syngress.com