What Is IT Outsourcing? How Can Your Small Business Benefit?

Did you know that, on average, IT downtime can cost a business around $5,400 per minute?

If your business is experiencing a lot of IT downtime, you might want to consider using the services of an IT outsourcing company. However, if you know very little about IT outsourcing, you may not know how this concept can help your business.

Read on, and you’ll learn everything you need to know about using an IT outsourcing service. Complete this post, and you should have no issues when answering the question, ‘what is IT outsourcing?’

Let’s begin!

What Is IT Outsourcing?

In simple terms, IT outsourcing is when you hire a specialist company to take care of the IT side of your business.

Outsourcing companies will maintain your IT systems, and they’ll also fix things if something goes wrong. They’re often used as an alternative to hiring full-time in-house staff, that are responsible for doing the same thing. 

Avoid the Cost of Hiring Staff

At this point, you might be wondering why someone might use outsourced support when they can just hire in-house staff.

Well, in most cases, in-house support can often be much more expensive than using an outsourced service. After all, you have to take on full-time staff, and this can be a considerable expense in and of itself.

If you use an outsourced IT service, you don’t have to pay for any full-time staff.

Instead, you just pay a set monthly fee, and the company will then take care of all your IT issues for you. As you might’ve guessed, this monthly fee is often lower than the monthly costs of hiring an ‘IT support’ employee.

Avoid Training Expenses

If you hire in-house staff, you will also need to pay for their training.

This is something that you can’t avoid, as the IT world is always changing.

If your staff doesn’t have the correct level of training, they may not be able to keep up with the changes in the IT sector. Following this, they might not understand how they can implement the latest IT technology into your business.

This could then put your business at a disadvantage, as the competition might have an edge over you simply because they have a better IT setup.

If you use an outsourced IT service, you don’t have to worry about paying this training fee. That’s because the outsourcing company will have already trained their team members.

Around the Clock Support

In-house staff generally work between set hours, and this can create issues if there’s an IT problem outside these working hours.

On the other hand, an outsourcing company typically provides 24/7 365 support.

This means that you’ll be able to handle IT issues at any point in the day. If staff work nightshifts, this kind of support can keep your business ticking over if there’s an IT issue in the middle of the night.

Choosing an IT Outsourcing Company

If you want to work with an IT outsourcing company, there are a couple of tactics you can use to find a company that’ll be a good fit for your needs.

To begin with, you might want to focus on finding a company that understands your specific niche. For instance, if you’re a doctor, you may want to find an outsourcing company that caters specifically to doctors.

One of the reasons for this is that different niches tend to make use of specialized software. So, if we take the earlier example of doctors, there’s probably one specific kind of software that is used by numerous doctors.

If you work with an IT outsourcing company that deals with doctors, there’s a good chance that they will be familiar with this ‘common’ bit of software. Following this, they’ll know how to troubleshoot it, should there ever be any issues.

If you work with an outsourcing company that doesn’t understand this software, they may have to spend lots of time figuring out how it works. This can create a lot of issues for your business, especially if the software fails in the middle of a busy period at work.

When selecting an IT outsourcing company, another thing you’ll want to focus on is reviews.

In some cases, you will be able to find some testimonials on the website of a given outsourcing company. However, it’s hard to judge the authenticity of such reviews, and so you should try to look for reviews on third-party review sites too.

Working With an IT outsourcing company

If you want to get the most out of your chosen outsourcing company, you need to be honest about what you want, even if you think it might be challenging to achieve.

You need to do this because some outsourcing companies aren’t proactive, and so they will not come to you with solutions. Rather, you need to tell them what you want, and they will then be able to get the job done for you.

For example, you might visit https://www.charlotteitsolutions.com/, and learn about the various ways you can lower your IT costs.

The IT outsourcing company might be aware of these ideas, but they might not entertain the idea of implementing them.

It’s because of this that you will probably need to mention these ideas to them. In doing so, the outsourcing company will then understand what you want, and they will be able to draw up a plan that allows you to hit your goals.

Will You Use an IT Outsourcing Service?

It should now be easy for you to answer the question, ‘what is IT outsourcing?’

You might like the idea of using an IT outsourcing company, but you might still have some doubts. If that’s the case, you may want to bring on a company for a short trial period of around three months.

During this period, you might discover that your business doesn’t really need such a service. However, you might also find that an outsourcing service is the best investment you could make in your business at this moment in time.

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Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.