subject: In-house IT Management VS Outsourced IT Management [print this page] With the advent of technology, the IT infrastructure part of a company has gained a lot of importance. Before signing up a company for any kind of work, what is the first thing you check? Is it the technological competency? Yes, I believe that is the key. Information technology infrastructure is like a parameter people judge companies on. It reflects its capabilities and the level of reliability and security offered. Companies have a separate IT department dedicated to the in-house management of this section or so was the case unless outsourcing came up.
In-house IT management involves maintaining an on-site IT team, available at hand, taking care of all your IT issues immediately. The team consists of skilled IT professionals specialising in particular spheres like system engineering or system analysis or general support or IT management as a whole. These are the proper employees whom your company train and maintain with salaries. However, the saddest part is that the amount you spend on them is not fully extracted in the form of service as you get to utilize just a part of their skills. Moreover, you can't be having IT issues coming up all the time, so mostly it is wastage. Plus, the team's scope of knowledge will be limited to the resources provided by your company. Having an on-site IT professional trained in all possible fields is, if not impossible, at least rare and expensive. Nevertheless, you might still like the idea of having a known face nigh ready to help any time you want.
Outsourced IT management involves treating IT Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Basically IaaS falls under the concept of Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) that has a twofold role of establishing industrialization and virtualization in your company with help of a pool of varied resources like the servers, the application servers, the web servers, the database servers and the storage instances rather than distinct instances. You will have IT experts hired from an off-site IT service provider that generally serves multiple companies together. Few people are assigned to study the details of your company, weigh the present condition, note down the problems and chalk out ways to solve it.
Every time you call for a service from the same company, the same set of people will look after your task so that the first few steps of studying and analysing can be carefully skipped and service can be provided as soon as possible. Plus, the outsourced IT management can get you professionals skilled in any field you want at an affordable price. So, the disadvantage of limited knowledge of the in-house IT professionals can be avoided with the plethora of options available among the employees of the IT service provider. You also need not worry about keeping pace with time, as this will not be your concern with an outsourced IT management. All the headaches of having the latest software and hardware, using the most popular coding language will be taken care of by the service providers. Clearly, you get to concentrate on what you are good at while the IT vendors concentrate on their strengths.
The latest trend is however to have a perfect blend of both. This will reduce your general cost and still keep you prepared for emergencies.
In-house IT Management VS Outsourced IT Management
