For you to better grasp what an IT-Outsourcing is, we’ll break it down in two parts and begin with the outsourcing definition itself.
Outsourcing is a practice of hiring workers outside of an organization. So basically this is like hiring a plumber. The only difference is that outsourcing can also be a long term relationship. You will have a contract with the people you hire, but they won’t be your employees.
Now IT-Outsourcing as you may already guess means that you hire someone to handle information technology tasks. Most commonly companies use IT-Outsourcing for maintenance of hardware, software, or network devices in a company. But that’s just a beginning.
Today outsourcing is extremely common. A fun fact — even such companies as Google use outsourcing. If they do, there must be a good reason for that.
So now we’ll talk you thought the benefits of outsourcing and why for most companies it’s much better than building an inner IT-infrastructure.
And this might be the most important reason because in the end business is all about making money. Studies show that outsourcing may save a company as high as 25% to 40% of expenses.If you outsource you pay only for a certain amount of work. You don’t need to purchase hardware, rent extra space for an IT-department. The payroll is reduced and there are no expenses for training, employee taxes and their benefits.
When you outsource you always know how much do you pay monthly or for a whole project and this amount is constant. It makes budget planning more transparent.
Recruiting is always hard and takes a lot of time. What’s more important you can’t hire a good specialist if you aren’t one or don’t have one in our company. You just won’t be able to tell if a person has the needed skills or just pretends to have. Even if you do it can be hard to find a good specialist in time. With outsourcing, you eliminate all of that. A team of highly skilled IT-professionals will be able to start working for you on demand.
You don’t lose time if your employees get sick, unexpectedly quit, and so on. Also, there are no vacations for your outsource providers, so you can do more in less time.
Having your own hardware is very expensive and is just impossible for small businesses. Outsourcing allows them to carry out tasks that would have never been possible on their own and for a decent price.
For most companies, IT is a support function and not a competency. Building own IT-infrastructure will drain a lot of resources and won’t likely give a competitive advantage. If your business isn’t technology, do what you do best and focus on that. Don’t waste time on doing what you aren’t supposed to and leave it to experts.
If you need IT-services only occasionally you definitely need outsourcing. Just imagine that you have to recruit a new team each time you have a little task or even more absurd — let it stay and pay for not working in the meantime.
Outsourcing will be drastically cheaper and easier way of maintaining an IT-infrastructure. Even if you have your own hardware in most cases a specialist can take care of it remotely.
Finding a ready-made IT-product like for example software that suits all your needs is always a hard task. And most of the time it’s impossible because even the best software often needs some tuning or even reworking.
You might think now that outsourcing is a silver bullet. Maybe it is, but sometimes there are better options. It all depends on the work to be done and can be hard to tell which is better without experience.
Luckily, we have it.