*The IT wizards

or why DIY is not the solution

The managing director of a medium-sized company was a man of exceptional calm. This calm was based on a simple but remarkably durable worldview: If it blinks, it works.

And the IT blinked.

The entire IT operation was handled by his nephew. The nephew was studying something related to computer science, which meant he regularly used words like “stack,” “layer,” and “it’s actually quite simple.” He also had fellow students. Fellow students were essential, because together they formed the IT Wizards, a group that could best be described as an IT collective, sustained mainly by energy drinks, pizza, and the firm belief that real problems always belonged to someone else.

The network was a marvel of modern engineering. No one knew exactly how it was structured, but it had a name. The name was long and complicated. This alone proved it was professional.

Nearby stood the firewall. Or in front of it. Or possibly around it. Firewalls, the nephew explained, were basically medieval city walls, only without stones and with significantly more updates. Updates were important. Updates were critical. Updates were, on rare occasions, forgotten.

Once.

On that particular day, the firewall decided it had been neglected long enough and metaphorically swung open like a deeply offended clam. Things happened. Screens froze. One printer began printing for no apparent reason, possibly out of fear. The incident was later officially described as “a brief system irregularity,” which essentially meant that someone held the reset button for a very long time.

After that, everything worked perfectly again. This was evident because it resumed blinking.

The managing director was pleased. IT security was working at least 99 % of the time. And as everyone knew, the remaining 1 % was, statistically speaking, basically the same as 100 %.

There was, of course, the minor issue of several employees recently leaving for a competitor. Said competitor was investing more money in development and claimed to be faster thanks to a new method—one that this company had, rather inconveniently, played a leading role in creating. This was annoying. Almost cosmically annoying.

But, as the managing director calmly observed, with the confidence of a man who had never used a password longer than four characters: “That has nothing to do with IT.”

And so everything stayed exactly as it was. The firewall blinked. The nephew explained things using diagrams. And the universe decided not to interfere just yet—though it did make a careful note of the company’s name, just in case.

End....not really, please read more

The C-level perspective

The lowest IT cost is achieved shortly before the most expensive incident.

From a finance perspective, ad-hoc IT appears efficient because its risks are conveniently excluded from the budget. They are not eliminated — merely deferred, where they quietly accrue interest.

Unmanaged IT transforms capital expenditure into optimism, operating expenditure into hope, and contingency planning into a firm belief that “this has worked so far.” Accounting standards do not currently recognize hope as an asset, though some organizations try.

Managed services, by contrast, are aggressively unromantic. They replace faith with contracts, intuition with SLAs, and late-night crisis calls with invoices that arrive on time and behave as expected.

For a CFO, the value is not lower absolute cost. It is the elimination of financial jump scares — those sudden, unplanned expenses that appear without warning and insist on being explained to the board.

Bottom line: Managed services turn IT from a speculative belief system into a controlled financial instrument. The universe still enjoys chaos — but with managed services, it usually targets someone else.

End, finally.

*This article was created with current market events in mind using ChatGPT. The prompt creation and supervision of the article was done by the author, who sees his opinion represented herein.

About the author:

Michael Martens is CEO of RIEDEL Networks and author of numerous technical articles, industry statements and commentaries in relevant publications. With a clear view of technological developments and their impact on the economy and society, he regularly classifies current topics and takes a stand on key issues relating to digital infrastructure.

From time to time, however, his fingers get itchy: then he leaves traditional specialist communication and picks up on current market events in the form of a gloss or satirical commentary. With subtle irony and a penchant for exaggeration, he scrutinizes industry-specific trends, political decisions and technological absurdities - always with the aim of providing food for thought and questioning familiar perspectives with a wink.

For these excursions into satirical commentary, he occasionally draws on the support of ChatGPT - always with his own conceptual control, editorial revision and clear responsibility for content.

His contributions deliberately operate at the interface between specialist knowledge and humor - and invite readers to view even complex topics from an unusual perspective.

About RIEDEL Networks

RIEDEL Networks is a privately held, global network provider focused on customized networks. We are listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global WAN Services as a niche provider specializing in mid-sized international enterprises and the media and events sector. With our own global backbone, we help companies to be connected worldwide. Our services include internet connectivity, MPLS, SD-WAN, SASE, Cloud Connect, security and much more. Our customers come from various industries and value quality, security and reliability. RIEDEL Networks is a 100% company of the RIEDEL Communications Group in Wuppertal, Germany, and is fully privately owned by Thomas Riedel.