There's a common misconception going around in the business community. This misconception is that, somehow, IT outsourcing is inherently worse than hiring internal staff. While there are undoubtedly benefits to having your tech support with you on-site at all times, the real difference in service between the two isn't a large one.
In fact, in recent years, outsourcing has become even better than insourcing!
In this article, we'll discuss how and why this is possible.
How External IT Providers Have Closed The Gap
In the past, the biggest benefit for an on-site IT provider instead of an outside one was response time. On-site IT staff actively work with you, so if anything happens, they can respond immediately -- this benefit is undeniable.
However, the evolution and adoption of cloud servers has made this benefit borderline obsolete. There's no need for on-site IT staff when your cloud server is automatically managed, updated and maintained without any input from you or your employees. Any changes that need to be made can be made by you or your provider, and in the case of an incident you always have redundancy to count on, thanks to large data centers and good backups.
How Internal IT Staff Can Backfire
It's easy to assume that you can trust internal IT more than IT outsourcing. After all, your internal IT team is your employees. You see them every day and you're treating them right, so of course they're just as loyal to you and want to give you honest advice.
...Right?
Unfortunately, most on-site IT managers are focused more on the advancement of their careers than your business. This means that when it comes down to it, giving you the best advice can hurt their profit margin. They also have an incentive to encourage you to upgrade your hardware and software to something more new, expensive and complex. This is because an IT technician's salary is directly proportionate to the complexity of the work they've performed, and having more experience under their belt makes them look like a prettier prospect for any big business or tech company that want to pick them up.
This can be especially harmful if they don't grasp the new system quickly enough, which they likely won't. Not only will you be paying them for the time they spend learning the new system, but while they're figuring it out, you and your business are fishes out of water, dealing with all kinds of new growing pains and even potential glitches and service outages if the system is unstable or untested.
Once your IT tech has gathered enough experience on a wide range of systems, he will start looking for bigger businesses that can pay him more. This will leave you without an IT director, and to find a new one you'll have to pay more because you've been left with whatever unholy expensive system your old one insisted that you get.
What You Can Do
Most IT outsourcing companies legitimately do not care about your upgrade plans. In fact, they usually don't want you to -- since that would mean they'd have to spend extra money training their staff on new hardware and software, or hiring new staff entirely that already knows how to do with it. The only time an outside company will have an incentive to get you to upgrade is if you need to upgrade. To learn more about tech and IT support, feel free to give us a call: 405-813-4455. Our company EMSCO Solutions operates in Oklahoma, so if you're nearby and feel like we could help you out, you should contact us for a consultation.
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