Outsourcing work that cannot effectively be done in-house is a huge part of how companies should do business. A study by The Economist on modern outsourcing found that manufacturers typically outsource 70 to 80 percent of their finished products. The same study also found that 90 percent of these companies saw outsourcing as playing a key role in their growth strategies.
So, if these companies can outsource their manufacturing needs, why are so many businesses afraid of doing the same for their IT department and data management?
What can outsourced IT provide companies?
Of course, companies should never completely do away with their own IT departments. That being said, allowing a separate entity to handle certain aspects of the company’s IT needs allows the business’s internal IT personnel the chance to work on new ideas.
As Howard Baldwin stated in an article for Forbes, IT department’s regularly get bogged down in “fire-fighting mode – reacting to every issue that (comes) up to keep things up and running.” When this happens, IT employees aren’t free to pursue interesting endeavors that may innovate the company. By outsourcing these everyday occurrences and other projects to an outside firm, employees can truly change how a company uses the technology available to it.
A perfect example of this would be IT support for all the software and technologies businesses deal with on a regular basis. Sure, software providers are usually there to give support on their products. However, these software providers simply cannot cope with the system wide consequences of using their products in terms of the specific kinds of technology a company is using.
This is something an internal IT department could certainly deal with, however, something so banal would simply take away from their ability to develop the company. Outsourced IT companies are more than happy to take on this responsibility, as well as other mundane tasks such as malware removal and helping companies switch to a colocation of data.