Pros and Cons of Outsourcing IT Services

As the acceptance and usage of technology increases, there is a raise in the operational pressures and this makes the majority of the companies transform from in-house to IT outsourcing services.

Besides, technical innovation has created a huge demand for skilled professionals who have wide-ranging expertise. Therefore, by hiring external IT solution vendors, businesses can get access to the services for crisis resolution, infrastructure management, and threat monitoring.

Some of the IT outsourcing companies enable the businesses to hire their entire IT department, while others provide consultancy to the client. Either way, IT outsourcing offers many benefits in comparison to the in-house model. In this blog, we will learn more about IT outsourcing and have a look at the pros & cons of using it.

What is IT Outsourcing?

IT Outsourcing is the process of hiring a team that can handle your IT infrastructure and other entities. The team outsourced is responsible for outlining all the expectations of your business and aligning them as per your business strategy.

Basically, IT outsourcing is a business strategy in which an organization signs a contract with an external IT solutions provider to get their application or software developed. There are multiple reasons because of which a business chooses to go for IT outsourcing. Some of these reasons are –

• Reduce Operating Costs
• Get access to industry experts and better software
• Share app development risk with the IT service provider
• Keep the internal resources free
• Streamlining the focus of the organization

Top IT Outsourcing Services

There are different types of IT outsourcing. Some of them are –

1. Onshore Outsourcing
2. Nearshore Outsourcing
3. Offshore Outsourcing

Frequently Outsourced IT Services by Business

• Application and Software Development
• Application Support or Management
• Web Development and Hosting
• Database Development and Management
• Telecommunications
• Infrastructure
• Technical Support and Help Desk

Pros of Outsourcing IT Services

Here are some of the major advantages of using the outsourcing IT services –

• IT outsourcing Knowledge and Resources
  

Having an expert IT team with varying specialization as your outsourced IT service provider is one of the best things to get your software developed.

The outsourcing service providers often offer verticals and maintain the development team of skilled resources and technologies that your company can use without paying their salaries. Basically, when you outsource the IT services your organization is definitely going to benefit from it as the professionals will be skilled enough to use any latest technology.

• Efficient Experts
  

When an IT outsourcing company is well-established, it offers the best and deep bench of IT outsourcing consultants with expertise in all the latest technologies.

These experts are best suited for each IT job at hand. Basically, when you have experts in your team, very little time is needed to complete and finalize the app development project, regardless of its size.

• Lower Labor Cost
  

It is reported that around 300,000 jobs are outsourced by the United States every year. And the countries that organizations prefer to outsource from are India and China.

The main reason behind it is that the majority of the companies want to hire a team at lower labor costs. But they also don’t want to trade quality for cost. Therefore, IT outsourcing from developing countries is one of the best options as they have a global talent pool.

• Free to focus

When an organization decides to go with outsourcing, one of the reasons for making this decision is to keep the company’s attention on its core initiatives. Whether they are outsourcing for full-time or for day-to-day tasks, both can help them save a lot of time and money that might have gone into training staff and addressing fixes.

• Emergency Response

If there is an outage the hired outsourcing IT provider will have enough resources and team members that can help your business prepare for it and respond to it immediately.

In the same situation, if you rely on an in-house person, there might be a limitation in knowledge and experience.

The reason behind it is that your in-house team will have fewer resources and fewer developers to resolve critical issues. And this can result in downtime of the software for a few hours. Therefore, outsourcing an IT team is one of the best decisions any company can make if they don’t have enough resources.
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Cons of Outsourcing IT Services

Here are some of the major disadvantages of using the outsourcing IT services –

• Lack of Coordination
  

The majority of the organizations make a mistake by attempting to patchwork outsourced IT consultants with their internal team. Though the hybrid IT models can prove to be highly effective for the company they also require some form of IT leadership. It can be from either in-house or external teams. Because without any IT team leader, responsibilities are obscured.

• Hidden Costs
  

Though IT outsourcing is one of the best solutions, if the organization doesn’t hire a trustworthy vendor, there are chances that the IT outsourcing company will come up with unexpected bills during the development process can result in huge savings, the converse is true when pairing with the wrong partner.

Therefore, it is really important to define your goals properly and finalize the budget of the development tasks at the very beginning.

• Data Security

Going with IT outsourcing immediately gives third-party access to your company’s data which might result in data security risk. Therefore, before outsourcing the company should come up with a different way, they can secure their data and robustly protect it from any kind of cyber-attacks or data breach.

• Negative Impact on Your Company Culture 

The majority of the organizations focus on the benefits of outsourcing and forgets that there are different ways in which it can impact their company.

So, if you plan to outsource IT, service providers, make sure to take the required steps so that it doesn’t have a negative effect on your organization’s culture.
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Conclusion

As seen in this blog, the pros and cons of IT outsourcing majorly depend on the requirements and the nature of your organization. Though there are few downsides in hiring an IT outsourcing company, those can easily be avoided if you make the right choice while hiring the service providers.

Sachin Joshi

Sachin Joshi is a tech consultant and a full time blogger. You will find his bylines at many good and reputed publications. When he is not writing you will find him doing some social services with some NGOs.