To the cloud? Absolutely.

There is an old rule at work here: we fear what we do not know. With IT outsourcing, meaning handing IT functions and processes to a specialist firm, that fear costs you something real.

Several things make IT outsourcing worth a serious look, both for what it does to a company's capability and for what it does to its costs.

And right now, costs count.

1. Lower costs

Money first, of course. That is the reality for most small and medium companies today. How do you stay viable, and dare we say it, do that with some ambition? IT outsourcing is one answer. It brings a current view of your infrastructure, expertise across several specialisations, and a wide pool of resources. Covid deserves some of the credit for how far outsourcing models have come. The more progressive among us learned in that period that a great many things can be improved and solved effectively from a distance. That is exactly what IT outsourcing is. These services scale and they move quickly, and combined with genuine expertise they let you take a piece out of your fixed costs. An outsourced IT firm adjusts the hours it spends to the job in front of it, and it looks at your systems with fresh eyes and no baggage. The result is IT that runs securely, on current technology, and for less than the same work costs with your own staff.

2. Access to expertise. Be better than the competition

Nobody is born knowing this. But the sheer amount of accumulated brainpower in an IT firm does make you wonder whether IT specialists arrive holding a computer 😊. Seriously, though: how many specialists would you have to employ to cover your IT properly and to be better than your competitors because of it? Technology and artificial intelligence are moving at a remarkable pace, and using IT specialists to improve and modernise your processes is a real opportunity. You get more done, and you have a way to grow what the company is capable of. So why not join the early adopters and look at this part of your business with some ambition? Efficiency is what keeps companies in the leading group.

3. Undivided focus on the core business

Spending your full time on the business and on moving it forward is the unfulfilled dream of many a manager and owner. There are dozens of small tasks, errands and problems to solve, streamline or delegate. Outsourcing is the arrangement where you use a specialist firm's expertise so you can concentrate entirely on your core business, with everything secondary running smoothly, safely and efficiently. IT outsourcing is exactly what lets companies focus on their key strengths and strategic goals without pouring attention and resources into IT. They get to be efficient and to concentrate on what they do best.

4. Better security, less risk

Do you know what a company's biggest asset is these days? Largely its own data and internal information. Security is therefore a critical area and worth extra attention. There are several studies on how many companies never recover from an attack or another cyber incident. Not one of them puts the figure below 30 %. It might look as though handing this responsibility to an outside firm is the wrong move. The opposite is true. The regular monitoring that IT outsourcing brings, along with other tools and security standards, cuts the risk of damage to your systems many times over. A professional backup plan and proper identity and access management do the same.

5. Better quality across the whole company

Companies introducing anything new usually meet something other than enthusiasm first. A manager who gets the staff through that change often gives the company a step change in quality. IT outsourcing can do the same. Better performance and better-designed systems go hand in hand with more efficient internal processes. Take one example: being able to connect securely from anywhere to the same single document, without generating countless versions of it. That is one small feature of Office 365. Professional IT outsourcing helps a company improve at its own pace, in cost, in process and in staffing, because the services scale. Let us advise you as part of an IT audit on where outsourcing could take your company.