Every business needs the help of technology to maximize its reach and work in the current world. So, it suffices to say that the IT systems form a core part of the business.
When it comes to maintaining your IT systems, there goes a lot of work regarding the updates, exploring new techs to improve productivity and work among the competition. You will need a team of IT specialists to take regular care of your systems and keep them in good shape.
Now the biggest question is: do you plan to outsource the IT work or keep it in-house?
In this blog, we’ll compare both the choices and lay out the practicalities in both options for you to decide.
How Can You Choose Between an In-House IT Team or an Outsourced IT Company?
When you require continuous IT support, be it for application updates, regular monitoring, or implementing new IT systems, which is the best choice: an IT consulting team or an in-house team? Let’s find out.
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Flexibility in Terms of Implementation
When you’re a startup or small business growing rapidly in your market, it’s hard to anticipate your IT needs clearly. When your expectations aren’t clear, then it’s challenging to recruit new employees for your IT team and make the best out of the team.
In such situations, having a reliable outsourcing IT support team reaps so many benefits. Even when there’s an unprecedented amount of work for you, the company offering IT support makes sure to cover all your rising needs. Instead of worrying about requirements for new technology, you can focus on product development and implementation and have a supportive IT team to back you.
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Room for Scalability
Yes, having internal resources you can walk-in any time and speak to is great. But have you thought about scaling the team?
It’s an enormous task, one that’s difficult for a growing company aspiring to become a scale-up. By scaling, we don’t just mean the IT team but also the resources, tools and software your in-house team relies on to provide the best IT services.
Having an outsourced IT consulting firm ready to fill in when the need arises would help your IT team keep with your scaling needs. When you need to release a new IT product fast, update an application or create new automated process pipelines, the outsourced team will already have the experience, resources and skills to handle them.
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Access to Skillset
Your decision to choose between an in-house team and an outsourced team could also depend on the skills you require right now and in the near future. When your IT support requirements are simple, you can do well with a few in-house employees.
But when you have complex tasks and unexpected IT challenges to manage, you need a highly skilled and updated team to quickly attend and resolve the issue. If not, it can lead to security issues, system failures or a lot worse.
While you can create such an expert team in-house, it can’t be done in a day. And of course, you need to spend a lot more money to hire such highly-skilled employees, which takes us to the next point.
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Cost Factors
Hiring a whole team of IT experts full-time means a lot of money that goes only for the salary. But it doesn’t stop at that. Even the most skilled IT team can’t give their all without the best resources to work with. This means you need to shell out more to procure the IT tools, systems and software for the in-house team.
When you go with an outsourced IT solution consulting team, you don’t have to worry about salary, buy the technical resources, or search for new employees to recruit. You can solely focus on your main task and pay the team a monthly agreed amount to work with your internal team.
This could not just save you money but the troubles of going to the lengths and hiring IT experts, managing them and overseeing their work.
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Availability
Of all the employees in an organization, the IT team is the one that should be available round-the-clock. You never know when there’s an emergency or a breach in the security and you need the skilled team to quickly rectify the issue.
Particularly for this factor, it’s best to have an outsourced team working 24X7 so that they can be on top of any emergency and fix it.
What Options Do You Have?
Let’s say that you already have a small in-house IT team helping you with the day-to-day work. But your business is expanding and the team is struggling to handle the workload.
So, what are your options?
Do you ditch your in-house team and take on an outsourcing company?
Do you hire more in-house employees even when you aren’t sure if you can manage the cost and the workload in the near future?
Well, there’s an in-between option here – you can keep your in-house team and outsource a good chunk of the work to a good IT consulting firm. Since your in-house team is familiar with your ongoing IT systems, they can help the outsourced team understand and begin the work.
The outsourced team can absorb the workload that your employees can’t handle. They can coordinate the work for any new project, provide educational assistance for your employees to learn the ropes of new technologies and it can turn out to be a win-win for all.
You can even search for ‘IT services near me’ online and find one near your area of business. This way, you can have face-to-face discussions periodically if that’s what you prefer.
If you’re looking for an IT consulting firm in Corpus Christi, you can reach out to our experts in LayerOne Networks. We provide outsourced IT services with flexible models and pricing to take care of IT system management.