Sooner or later, any company is faced with the choice between building its own IT department or concluding an agreement with an outsourcing company. In Runet, you can find many arguments for and against both one and the other options.
Naturally, each business sets its own goals and development plans, which are compared with the goals and objectives in IT and, based on this, make one or another decision. Let’s look at the benefits of both options. If you want to read more about how to Outsource Web Development in 2024 you could read the full article.
Loss Coverage
In the event of an SLA violation or negligence on the part of the outsourcing company, the latter will be ready to make a substantial discount of up to 50% for the agreed period in order to preserve the client and his reputation, which will bring benefits to the outsourcer in the long run, while the local specialist will not be ready to leave for a long period with the lion’s share of salary. It’s easier for him to change his employer.
IT Infrastructure Development
Despite the fact that many will say that there is no infrastructure development process in SMB, i.e. once done and everything will work, there are many examples when a company starts with 3-5 people, grows up to 15-20 people, and IT remains at the same level, which leads to the fact that the business is not something that cannot develop, and even stops and incurs losses, because the level of automation does not correspond to modern realities.
Therefore, it is very important to initially build a scalable system that will not only meet the current needs of the business, but also expand or modify at minimal cost in a short time. This approach to building IT infrastructure is not inherent to local specialists. Their task is to make the system work at the current time, often without comparing the strategic tasks of the business with the tasks of the IT structure.
Experience and Innovative Activity
A company that provides IT outsourcing services often has a wide range of specialists of various specializations who work with different clients and different tasks. To provide the same set of professionals of various specializations in the company staff is a difficult and expensive task.
Interchangeability
Unlike full-time employees, the outsourcing company provides another specialist to solve problems at the customer company for the period of vacation, illness or dismissal of a dedicated engineer.
Systematization of the IT Department
The outsourcer company works on tasks that are recorded and controlled by both the customer and the executing company. Such tasks will not be lost, they have deadlines, an action plan and the expected result.
In addition, the outsourcer company always seeks to minimize the specialist’s labor costs for the client’s planned tasks, thereby increasing the productivity of their own engineer.
To do this, monitoring systems are used that allow proactively responding to problems, as well as automated backup systems with notification of its successful or unsuccessful implementation.
Personnel Changes
The process of changing a team of full-time specialists is expensive and sometimes complicated (both psychologically and legally). When working with an outsourcer company, you can either find a competitor (which can bring financial benefits – savings) or change the team within the outsourcer company, because often the contractor has several such teams.
Features of Service by a Full-Time IT Specialist
Information Security
It is believed that information leakage is more likely through the employees of the outsourcing company, since TOP management has no effect on the employees of the contractor. But the likelihood of a “purchase” of a full-time specialist is no less than that of an outsourced company specialist.
In addition, an outsourcer company is often financially and legally responsible for the leakage of confidential information. The outsourcer company will also strive to reduce the risks of leakage of information of its customers, since the reputation component is very important in this business, therefore, it is often the outsourcer company’s chance of leakage of customer information that is less than that of a full-time specialist.
Incident Response Speed
It is believed that since a full-time specialist is close to users, he will quickly solve problems. It is difficult to disagree with this, but the outsourcer company builds the IT infrastructure in such a way that there are no failures, or the failure does not stop the IT infrastructure, uses monitoring systems that allow you to respond proactively to incidents, i.e. prevent them.
For example, in large companies, technical support is also mainly carried out by phone, through the ticket system, since it is very difficult to ensure the presence of a specialist in such an area.
Controllability
A full-time specialist is easier to manage. He can be threatened with dismissal, or threatened with a reduction in bonus, after which he begins to solve either non-core tasks, or takes a more responsible attitude to the tasks set.
In fact, a properly drawn up contract, like the ones you can find at Signaturely.com, with an outsourcing company, indicating the SLA and the list of services provided, seems to be a more manageable system than an unpredictable system administrator who can change jobs without warning.
Independence of payment on the number of jobs
The presence of a system administrator suggests that he is already getting some kind of payment and an increase in, say, the computer park by 10 units will not affect his income level in any way, while the outsourcing company charges its services for a unit of equipment or workplace.
The argument is indisputable, but for the time being, because there may come a time when the system administrator can no longer cope with the incidence shaft and the top management will have a rather important question about opening another vacancy of the system engineer, which will double the payroll rate. Whereas an outsourcer company has such costs increase gradually and predictably.
Thus, it is important to correctly identify business priorities and make the right choice in relation to building an IT department, taking into account all the pros and cons. Naturally, the above comparison is conditional, but, nevertheless, shows the approximate amount of financial resources that can be saved.
