It Outsourcing- Streamlined & Cost-effective!

By Author: Alex Smith
Total Articles: 171
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Hiring a third-party service provider for managing your IT needs is necessary as you cannot handle your IT infrastructure without expert help. For various functions of IT department, businesses are using IT outsourcing services. In the business computing days, outsourcing of IT services were started in the late 1950s with service bureau operations of giant hardware vendors like IBM, Univac, etc. Basically, these services are helpful in reducing costs, improving operational flexibility and resulting in increased productivity. Enterprises outsource their IT management generally and companies outsource their data storage needs.
Every coin has two sides. Therefore, IT Outsourcing also has its own pros and cons.

Pros

• You need to bear reduced IT cost as these service providers are efficient and affordable.
• You get the access to outstanding IT skills and resources.
• You need not to hire your in-house IT staff.
• You can reduce your IT infrastructure capital expenditure.
• You can make better use of IT resources for future perspective.

Cons

• You cannot control ...
... the crucial business service.
• Lack of flexibility in regard of services received.
• Staff morale down or culture clashes.
• Distractions in managing the relationship with service provider.

Popular functions of IT Outsourcing

Irrespective of the size, almost all the IT organizations spend five to six percent of their IT budget in outsourcing services. Talking about the benefits of outsourcing, it can actually enjoyed by small and medium sized enterprises. The most relevant IT functions are desktop support, data center operations, disaster recovery and website or ecommerce systems. Help desk outsourcing is the function used by large organizations especially. Other than this, application maintenance, application development and data network operations service providers are making profit from small businesses. Application development can be used as the most popular outsourced function. But, in the present economic environment it is losing its identity as IT organizations are going back to project-based work.
According to the survey conducted by Gartner Group, 85 percent of companies are planning to increase their expenditure in external service providers.

How to plan IT Outsourcing?

For successful execution of outsourcing services:

• Go through your business operations first so as to understand the existing IT operation. After that, you can decide what you exactly want from external IT services.
• Try to find the best organization that fulfill your needs and objectives.
• Conduct inspection on the third-party contracts and licenses.
• Before signing the contract and during contract negotiation, decide an orderly transfer procedure as per which the outsourced services can be transferred back to you or to another service provider when the contract ends.
• Always negotiate the outsourcing transaction so that the terms can be written in service agreement.
By hiring the external IT services with adequate planning, you can get the most out of their expertise and skills. Also, you can help them in understanding your business better so that they can offer support solutions as per the business needs. You can outsource the particular portion of your IT infrastructure and if you think you are making profit then go ahead.

Techvedic Inc is a Tech Support company offers it outsourcing, Small Medium Business, outsourcing companies, tech support, it support and more in the UK, US, Australia and Canada.