In most parts of business, doing something yourself - or at least within your own company - is a great way to save money. Not only that, but it lets you ensure a certain level of quality that you can't always get with an outside contractor. After all, no one cares about your company the way you do, and so it only makes sense to rely on your own team for your most important projects.
While that's generally a reasonable philosophy, it doesn't hold up particularly well when it comes to IT. That's because, strange as it might seem, you can very often save more by outsourcing IT than you would handling it in-house with full or part-time employees. Here are just a few of the biggest reasons why:
You'll probably eventually need to outsource your IT anyway. You can definitely hire a person or team to monitor your technology day-to-day, but there will probably come a time when you need the help of an outsourced IT provider with a broader set of capabilities. That's because there are a number of situations that call for the expertise that a single IT employee might not have.
For example, suppose you are moving your business from one facility to another, or opening up a new location. In that case, you'll want to consult with an outsourced IT team to make sure that all of your hardware and software are migrated properly, that you are saving money on any planned upgrades, and that your technology is a good fit, not to mention configured correctly, at your new location.
Other examples might include the installation of a specialized software package, or the formulation of a disaster and recovery plan. One way or another, you're likely to want and need outsourced IT at some point or another.
You'll end up paying less for better coverage. One of the biggest advantages of working with an outsource technology firm is that they can hire a number of different employees and share those expenses over a number of clients. To be more specific, you might not want to have two or three people on your team who are experts in network security, data backup, e-mail setup operations, etc. Having all of those specialties on staff would be prohibitively expensive... but not if your contracted company is hiring them for you.
For this reason, an outsource company can often give you much better coverage, in terms of keeping your technology working the way it should be, for a lot less than you would pay the same number of people to work on technology in-house.
An outsourced IT company can offer other benefits that an employee can't. In the same way, combining your IT services into a package price with an outsourced firm often gives you access to things like cloud servers or advanced backup and data recovery systems. Buying the hardware needed to run them for your own company could cost you a fortune, but with an outsourced IT partner, it doesn' t add much to your technology expenses.
Hiring employees to manage your technology in-house can seem like a great way to save money, but when you stop to think about it, it's usually not the best decision.
