An in-house IT specialist or IT outsourcing?

Every company needs IT that works properly, so every company should take an honest look at what it can manage. Company IT can be run in-house or with a supplier. Let us weigh up both. An IT infrastructure outage has a direct effect on how a company runs, and nobody can afford to put their services or their production at risk. So it pays to think about the problems in advance and make sure company IT keeps running.

When should a company handle IT itself?

Managing IT in-house makes sense when you have an employee who does more than IT administration, working with data as well, for example. That person is then genuinely occupied. If that same employee were only covering routine IT administration, they would not be well used.

Outsourcing also suits a company that does not strictly depend on its IT systems and has time to fix faults with its own people when something fails. Even then a problem can come up that the in-house staff cannot handle and they have to look for expert help. These are usually smaller companies.

When a company can manage IT itself

• When an outage does not seriously affect how the company runs
• When the company has enough time to fix problems and faults
• When the company can afford in-house IT specialists

When a company should choose IT outsourcing

• When an outage brings the company to a halt
• When data could be lost for good
• When the company needs its IT systems managed end to end

When to choose outsourcing

The main advantage of outsourcing is exactly its efficiency. The company gets more for less. When a company employs people in-house, their capability may not be well used. Some of the time they may be underoccupied, or the opposite may happen: the company has no specialist for a particular problem and has to solve it some other way.

There is also the situation where you need people and they are on holiday, or simply unavailable. That is just as inefficient, and when you put actual numbers on it you find that the company needs one IT person instead of two, which halves the cost. Except that one person cannot deliver a guaranteed response time, and there is nobody to cover for them when they are needed.

The advantages of IT outsourcing

"With outsourcing you can be sure the company has several specialists available." You pay only for what you need. It works out cheaper. The supplier can hold to a contractually agreed response time with 24/7/365 availability. The cost, compared with your own employee, comes to 25% to 50%.

About us

Detect has managed company IT for many years. If you want to talk through outsourcing yours, come and see us. Our specialists are here for you.