Here is a fact that catches a lot of teams off guard: buying public cloud does not include managing it. When you purchase services from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, even directly, operations are on you. That means you either hire certified engineers or you outsource the work. For most mid-market organizations, hiring is the more expensive and riskier of the two.
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What a certified engineer actually costs
To run a public cloud environment properly you need someone with the credentials, the licensing knowledge, and real experience operating in that cloud. That profile is roughly a $200,000-a-year employee, about $12,000 to $13,000 a month, and that is before you add insurance and the other costs that sit on top of salary.
One person is also not really enough for resilient operations. They take vacations, get sick, and eventually leave, and a single specialist is a single point of failure for your entire infrastructure.
The train-from-within trap
The common workaround is to promote and train someone internally. It is well intentioned, and it frequently backfires. Companies try to pay these people what they have always paid them, around $120,000 to $130,000 a year. Then the employee finishes the training, earns the certification, and takes that certification to a $200,000 job somewhere else.
So you carry the training cost and the ramp time, and still end up back at square one, now needing to hire or train again. It is one of the most common and most frustrating patterns for organizations trying to do the right thing by promoting from within.
What outsourcing gives you instead
- Expert team, fraction of the cost. A managed provider spreads a certified team across many customers, so you pay a portion of what one full-time specialist would cost.
- 24/7 coverage, not one person. No single point of failure, no gaps for vacations or turnover.
- No hiring, ramp, or retention risk. Staffing the expertise is the provider's problem, not yours.
- Breadth across platforms. Providers operate VMware, private cloud, and the public clouds, so you are not betting on one person's single skillset.
- Your team is freed up. A small in-house staff can shift from keeping the lights on to revenue-generating work and projects the business actually needs.
Hire vs. outsource, side by side
| Hire a certified engineer | Outsource management | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | ~$200k/yr + benefits | A fraction of one salary |
| Time to productive | Months to hire and ramp | Effectively immediate |
| Coverage | One person, business hours | 24/7 team |
| Retention risk | High, certified staff get poached | None, it's the provider's job |
| Breadth | One person's skillset | VMware + private + public cloud |
When hiring does make sense
This is not absolute. Organizations with large in-house IT teams (think dozens of engineers) often have the scale to operate their own environments and may not see the value in outsourcing. The economics flip in favor of hiring when you already run a deep bench. For small and mid-size teams, especially two-to-five-person shops supporting a whole business, outsourcing almost always wins.
Put real numbers on it
The honest comparison is your fully loaded cost to hire and retain versus a managed provider's fee for your specific environment. A Bridgepointe advisor builds that comparison for you, vendor-neutral and free. Start with a free assessment, or see how managed options compare to every other route in the top migration solutions guide.