Outsourcing is one of the best decisions that you could possibly make for your business. The key thing is that it reduces the number of administrative tasks that you have to handle directly. It also provides you with skilled, experienced, and reliable help when it comes to highly specialized tasks. The list of these advantages goes on and on.
While there are undoubtedly many advantages to IT outsourcing, today, we’re going to focus on just one – the cost. With that in mind and without further ado, here are the top five ways how outsourcing your IT can help you save quite a bit of money.
1. Decision-making process
According to Katana IT, the first thing you need to take into consideration when calculating the total cost of your IT process and comparing it against outsourcing is your decision-making process. First of all, it is important that there’s no clear-cut winner here. In the long run, in-house is supposed to pay off but it may take years and years until you reach this point, also, the immediate results will always be in favor of outsourcing.
First, you need to start by analyzing the task at hand. This should provide you with advanced insight and give you a rough estimate of your in-house costs. Then, you should look for outsourcing costs. The simplest (and the most accurate way to do so) would be to look for managed IT services providers and ask for a quote. Then, you compare these two figures over a certain period of time.
2. Lower investment
In order to start your own in-house IT department, you need to invest quite a bit initially. The hiring process can be quite expensive. After all, you’re hiring IT experts, as well as IT managers (whose services are not cheap) and keeping them all on a retainer. Then, you might need to consider the cost of the onboarding process, during which, they won’t be as productive as you would like. In other words, the value you get out of them won’t be the target value that you initially expected.
Next, you need to keep in mind that this team needs specialized tools and hardware. Once again, we’re not suggesting that these expenses are non-existent with third-party teams. They’re probably already included in the price. The way this works is that you need to pay less upfront in order to get decent performance.
3. Workaround the clock
One of the biggest issues regarding outsourcing is easier workforce management. If you need someone to jump in round the clock, the simplest way to do so is to entrust the scheduling to someone else. Paying people to work overtime, during holidays, on weekends, etc. will cost you extra. Once again, this is already included in what you already pay the agency that you’re outsourcing to, however, it strikes one budgeting worry off your list.
Apart from this, you need to consider the concept of hiring a global workforce. What does this mean? Well, hiring remote workers in order to fill in the overnight work (due to being in a different time zone) is much more convenient than you would expect. Technically, you could do this for your in-house team but there are a lot of companies who prefer to keep everyone on-site. After all, one of the strongest selling points of in-house departments is not the cost but the control.
4. Faster results
Getting immediate results is something that you can buy with money, however, doing this in-house would cost you astronomically. First, you would have to hire veterans, which won’t come cheap. Instead of finding promising prospects and waiting until they gain experience in your employ (and risk having them leave due to a better offer), what you should do is hire people whose competence level is already high enough.
Other than this, you also need to provide them with high-end tools and hope that they’ll start playing as a team right off the bat. As an alternative, you can just outsource and already get the services of veterans put together in a team. These are people who spent years in this position and are remaining in the team that they’re used to (using tools that they’re used to). In other words, it’s a huge advantage when it comes to the starting point.
5. The risk
Risk management is an incredibly expensive aspect of running a business. Just think about a situation of crisis for your IT department. An increased workload, an employee abandoning you, technical problems, market fluctuation, and similar occurrences can put a lot of stress on your business.
We’re not suggesting that these risks aren’t present when outsourcing. They’re just not your problem. Sure, it will cost to overcome these issues but neither of these occurrences (except maybe market fluctuation) is grounds for the agency to charge you more. In other words, your IT costs become more predictable.
In conclusion
In other words, while it may not bring lower costs, it does come with a lower initial investment and makes the payment structure much more budget-friendly. It makes the system more predictable and it makes your financial forecasts easier to make. On top of this, it takes a lot of logistical issues off your plate and passes them off to someone reliable and experienced in the subject matter. Overall, it provides you with immense help. This alone should have its monetary worth.
