We have no doubt in our minds that outsourcing portions of your IT tasks is right for you. You, however, might need a bit more convincing, so here are five reasons to sway your mind.
Five reasons why outsourcing portions of your IT actually helps your in-house IT get more done
- Can I outsource portions of my IT work? Yes you can!
We seem to find that smaller companies are the leaders in outsourcing IT portions but the truth is that any size company can benefit from outsourcing IT segments. Notice we are talking about outsourcing certain IT tasks. If your company has poor system infrastructure or poor internal communication, you probably want to fix those management issues before outsourcing IT tasks.
- We have a small IT Department. With all the cyber security concerns and new techniques coming at us every day, it seems our IT employees are handling all they can at maximum capacity. Can outsourcing help us with expertise issues?
Absolutely. Outsourcing to gain expertise can offer a cost savings to your company. You will not have to pay to send your employees to training sessions to keep them up to speed on technical developments. The outsourcing company trains your employees for you.
- Our IT folks are great at what they do. The problem is that help desk questions often eat up precious IT time. Sometimes we are slow answering help desk questions because we need to focus on the more complex, and often critical, technical problems. Can we just outsource our help desk?
Yes. We have seen many companies that outsource this function. Sometimes companies outsource because they have limited office space to expand their own IT department. Sometimes they just have too few employees to manage a busy help desk and attend to other pressing IT issues like the ever-evolving cyber security problems. Other times, the company just has too few employees to man a help desk 24/7 in various time zones. Whatever the reason, outsourcing your help desk function frees your existing IT employees to concentrate on your company’s critical IT tasks.
- Besides the help desk, what other IT functions do companies trust to third-party IT professionals?
There are probably 3 common IT tasks that companies outsource. They are data centers, disaster recovery, and e-commerce web design tasks. Third-party IT experts also tackle email marketing management, web hosting, anti-virus and anti-malware protection, and network infrastructure. Your outsource partner can help you with purchasing decisions, help keep office software up-to-date and keep up hardware and network devices. Data Centers especially need large commitments in terms of resources like space, equipment, and power. For this reason, many companies outsource data management and data storage.
- Can I tailor the IT outsourcing to match the services I need?
Absolutely. Being able to customize the services that will stay in-house and that you will outsource is the best part of outsourcing. You can start with just outsourcing the help desk if that is a drain on your current personnel’s time. Once you have built up a trusting relationship with your IT provider, you can add other pieces. For example, suppose you have a great IT team but do not have a CIO to take responsibility for strategic planning and oversight of the department. In that case, your outsource partner can serve as your management consultant and report directly to the C-Suite to help board members focus on IT strategic issues.
If you want to read more about outsourcing, please view the inspiration for this post provided by Information Week in an article entitled “Should Your Company Outsource IT Services?”
