Nanny vs. Daycare – The Case for Managed Identity Services

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<DISCLAIMER  – This is a not-so thinly disguised product pitch written by someone who has “Sales” in his title>

Late last year, right around the time I was contemplating joining Identropy, my wife and I were also faced with an important decision at home.  We had recently become first time parents and my wife was getting ready to go back to work.  After quickly abandoning some obvious non-starters (mostly due to the fact that I don’t need to spend that much time with either my parents or my in-laws), we were quickly down to the same choices that many working parents face: Get a nanny or enroll the baby in daycare.  Since this was happening in parallel with my attempt to assess the IDaaS market and see if Identropy was a fit for me, the two decisions juxtaposed a bit and I found some interesting parallels.

With a nanny, we would have someone that was 100% dedicated to only our baby.  However, we were on the hook to vet candidates, check references, negotiate a fair compensation package, etc. We talked to some friends that had excellent nannies and others that had some flaky experiences and had to go through hire/fire cycles until they found someone that “fit”.   And everyone seemed to agree that while nannies were much more expensive than daycare, it was nice having someone that knew their baby’s habits, tendencies, nap schedules, etc.  In my head, this was analogous to firms that operate all of their infrastructure and applications themselves.  Makes sense, right?  You expend the time and expense to find someone that “fits” but it’s justified because they know your systems, applications, and other core infrastructure.

It made sense to us too, until we heard the story that made us strongly assess the alternative.  It turns out that in the “Taking Care of Baby” system, a nanny is basically a critical and massive single point of failure.  We heard a story of how the nanny’s mother got sick (in the old country, natch) and with zero notice had to be out of pocket for several weeks.  Days off had to be negotiated with less-than-understanding employers, mothers-in-law flew in from remote and scary locations (like Cleveland), and the household was in turmoil.  And on further reflection, the same is true of running corporate IT infrastructure.  Employees take vacations, get sick, can leave for personal reasons, or find better jobs elsewhere. And even if there’s multiple people cross-covering a particular responsibility, it’s not unheard of for teams of people to depart together to work for a former mentor.  Nor is it unheard of that a malady sweeps through the office, particularly during flu season.  Or baseball season.

So we started looking at daycare.  It was certainly much more attractive from a pricing standpoint.  And there was no issue of coverage gaps, no “single point of failure”.  The only two drawbacks seemed to be that the personal touch of the nanny might be missing and we couldn’t keep an eye on what was going on with our baby.  Being up against it, we decided to take the plunge with daycare and it turns out that we couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.   Yes there were multiple caregivers there and yes they looked after babies besides ours.  But they couldn’t have been more up-to-speed on what she liked or disliked, when and how she liked to be put down for a nap, and how to get her to stop crying.  From a monitoring standpoint, we could check in on the baby via a webcam (secured of course) at any time to make sure that she was being well taken care of.  All in all, our biggest concerns about daycare turned out to be a paper tiger.

The same can be true about consuming outsourced *aaS services.  Of course you have to consider your providers and make sure that there’s a baseline understanding of your implementation and you need to make sure that you have a way of getting real-time updates on how your infrastructure is being monitored and maintained but if those concerns are met you may find that it truly provides the best of both worlds:  Personalized service and great coverage at a much more manageable price point.