The more your company develops, the more it depends on smooth operation of the IT infrastructure. Economic benefits of IT outsourcing are obvious and well-known, other benefits are not well known here are just a few of them:
Ø First of all, it is an opportunity to use the services of highly qualified specialists. Adding such employees to the staff is costly, and sometimes even impossible. Outsourcing your IT, you get the knowledge and experience of a whole team of professionals, who, most likely, have already encountered problems similar to yours.
Ø The same reasons give a rise to purely financial advantages of outsourcing: you don’t have to pay extra employees a salary, provide insurance and take care of their professional growth: you get an already trained specialist at a fair price, without a tax burden, additional costs during the IT-specialists vacations, and the cost associated with the organization of IT specialists’ training.
Ø You can also improve the information security of your system and reduce the risk of losing important data. When speaking about ensuring information security during outsourcing, it is meant to have a system of measures for the safe storage of information, streamlining and control of information flows. Information security, therefore, is, above all, the absence of carelessness in the processing, transfer, and storage of your company’s information.
Ø Finally, outsourcing is an effective way to respond quickly and overcome peak and emergency situations. Outside specialists are often irreplaceable if you need to repair a serious breakdown in a short time, to upgrade equipment or implement an information system if the load on the IT department is growing much faster than your staff.
Different criteria can be used to determine the feasibility of outsourcing IT services for your specific case. For example, the importance of service for business – services that are unimportant to a business should potentially be outsourced. If internal service within the company is provided inefficiently, outsourcing is also desirable.
The availability of a service on the market also plays a big role – it is easier to outsource services already offered by external IT service providers. It is necessary to analyze and determine the quality of each service offered by the outsourcing company – if this quality is better than what your IT department is able to provide, outsourcing this service is appropriate. The same applies to the cost of service – if it can be reduced, such a service can also be outsourced.
You can assess the feasibility of IT department outsourcing for your company by answering these three questions.
- What exactly you need in the IT structure and is it enough for the normal development of the entire business? You must remember that IT today is one of the key resources of any enterprise. One day, and sometimes just a few hours of computer downtime in the accounting department on the eve of the reports being due can lead to the saddest consequences.
- How much reliability and actual level of quality of the infrastructure do you need? Perhaps the current system reliability is enough for you or maybe you need to increase it several times.
- How much are you willing to spend on outsourcing services? At the same time, it must be remembered that neither extreme savings nor surplus IT investments are likely to bring tangible benefits. Here, you need to invest only the amount of money that is necessary.