Why Companies Outsource
As information technology has grown in importance – to… just about every company – determining how best to manage and support technology has become a pressing question for business leaders. For small and medium-sized businesses, and even for many large businesses, searching for the best answer to the question generally leads to a consideration of outsourcing.
publish date: May 3, 2021
As information technology has grown in importance – to… just about every company – determining how best to manage and support technology has become a pressing question for business leaders.
For small and medium-sized businesses, and even for many large businesses, searching for the best answer to the question generally leads to a consideration of outsourcing.
Some companies on the smaller end of the size spectrum try to handle the support and management of their IT investment with ½ or even ¼ of an existing staff person’s time. Often, someone with an IT background, or at least an interest in technology, and maybe even just an informally perceived proficiency, will be asked to step up and “take care of things.” Outsourcing can work well for these types of businesses where the employee can serve as an on-site resource and the IT company can handle things like helpdesk, security patching, projects, and more.
Some companies on the larger end of the size spectrum, with a dedicated full-time IT staff, often benefit when certain aspects of their network management are outsourced with a partner that possesses specific expertise in a particular area. This doesn’t necessarily replace existing IT staff, rather it supplements it cost-effectively. Sometimes in this scenario, the full-time IT resources are so busy with day-to-day operations and support they need specialized help for projects and deployments. Conversely, sometimes companies in the scenario simply want to outsource mundane tasks like patching and helpdesk. Outsourcing is a viable option for either scenario.
When you think about it, the question boils down to a fairly simple math equation: how much efficiency, and reliability, and security does a business need from their IT investment, and how little do they need to spend supporting it to get their desired outcomes?
Outsourcing often wins on both sides of the equation. A good IT company with a mature services offering can provide a nice list of benefits on one side of the equation and a good value on the other side.
From the cost perspective, the value of outsourcing often becomes apparent as well. The outsourced model allows companies to throttle their IT spending up or down depending on their needs. Worries about things like recruiting, IT training, turnover, and unplanned PTO, are eliminated in an outsourced solution.
Looked at from a 360-degree perspective, all of this most often results in greater peace of mind with a company’s technology, and with less expense.