User to IT ratio
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Here is an example of why this makes no sense to use equipment as the guide:
Company 1: 100 employees, buys Scale hyperconverged appliances, does VDI with WorkSpot, uses enterprise thin clients. All hardware is 100% under vendor management and support. All desktops are identical. Backups are to a Datto appliance, hosted. All network gear is Meraki and managed by a VAR. All software is Office 365 and other major SaaS applications. Ratio 100:1
Company 2: 100 employees. Servers are custom built by the IT department. Every desktop is made in house. Each machine is high performance and very unique. Replacement parts are stocked locally and IT does all swaps. Turn over is high. All main applications are written, tested and deployed internally. Mix of hypervisors, operating systems, hardware and apps are used. Backups are done by custom tools. Ratio 100:15
Totally different situations and approaches requiring totally different numbers of IT per user. The IT departments do very different tasks, too.
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DevOps will do the same kind of thing. If you look at servers to system admin ratio we get some crazy things.
Snowflake (no DevOps) the highest ratio I've ever seen is 600:1 servers to admins. The highest I've seen in a normal shop is around 35:1. 100:1 is extreme.
DevOps it is trivial to have 10,000:1.
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@scottalanmiller said in User to IT ratio:
Here is an example of why this makes no sense to use equipment as the guide:
Company 1: 100 employees, buys Scale hyperconverged appliances, does VDI with WorkSpot, uses enterprise thin clients. All hardware is 100% under vendor management and support. All desktops are identical. Backups are to a Datto appliance, hosted. All network gear is Meraki and managed by a VAR. All software is Office 365 and other major SaaS applications. Ratio 100:1
Company 2: 100 employees. Servers are custom built by the IT department. Every desktop is made in house. Each machine is high performance and very unique. Replacement parts are stocked locally and IT does all swaps. Turn over is high. All main applications are written, tested and deployed internally. Mix of hypervisors, operating systems, hardware and apps are used. Backups are done by custom tools. Ratio 100:15
Totally different situations and approaches requiring totally different numbers of IT per user. The IT departments do very different tasks, too.
Yes this is pretty much what I was trying to get at... That it depends because it's totally different from place ti place and industry.
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It's also important to consider all IT resources, not just certain kinds. For example, a company that outsources 100% might accidentally claim zero IT staff. Clearly that isn't right. Everyone outsources something, whether it is outsourcing direct IT or just "hard drive swaps". Nothing is really 100% internal.
So thinking about outsourcing is really important for figuring out what your real ratio is. Every NTG customer gets all of the NTG staff as part of their IT, for example. But not full time for all of them. So it gets super complex.
And then, in the end, the real answer is that the IT staff ratios even when really accurate aren't useful.
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@scottalanmiller said in User to IT ratio:
DevOps will do the same kind of thing. If you look at servers to system admin ratio we get some crazy things.
Snowflake (no DevOps) the highest ratio I've ever seen is 600:1 servers to admins. The highest I've seen in a normal shop is around 35:1. 100:1 is extreme.
DevOps it is trivial to have 10,000:1.
And there's sub categories in there also. I only have approximately 250 machines I manage (but growing), but they are spread over different physical networks and are air gapped. So it's much more work than 200 machines on a flat network with internet access.
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@stacksofplates Good point. Something as simple as the network setup can completely change things.
