IT Outsourcing Pros and Cons: Advantages That Mitigate the Risks

Outsourcing is a popular method for businesses to increase their efficiency and multitasking. While the outsourced team handles a certain aspect of the business, the internal team focuses on moving the business forward.

Like every other business model, IT outsourcing has its pros and cons. Let’s look at the most prominent IT outsourcing pros and cons to find out how you can suit your business.

But first, let’s find out why you would want to take the help of IT outsourcing in the first place.

Why Take Help of IT Outsourcing In The First Place

• Your company’s efficiency is dwindling with higher downtime
• Security problems are frequent
• The problems encountered by your enterprise are hurting the bottom line
• You don’t have enough IT resources to resolve all issues
• Customer support is not solving issues as fast as expected
• You don’t have an effective recovery plan
• You don’t have enough budget to invest in security
• Onboarding is expensive

Pros of IT Outsourcing

1. Mitigates Software Development Costs

Building a company from scratch is expensive, especially if you’re considering potential future growth and upgrades from the beginning. But when you’re funding everything yourself, the costs can quickly break your bank.

Certain corporate trends can take years, but technology is changing almost annually. To keep up with such a high-paced environment, you must constantly update the tool and the staff. Which, of course, costs a lot.

With IT outsourcing, you remove the hassle of constant upgrades since your partner agency is responsible for updating its staff and tools. As a result, you’re getting access to skilled professionals and the latest tools for a lower expense.

2. Improves Overall Quality of The Development Team

With IT outsourcing, you can handpick every team member; the choices are always high-end. When your team is full of people with years of expertise and additional insight into the business, the overall quality of the development team increases, allowing you to deliver high-quality end products.

3. Saves Additional Time Spent on Hiring

One of the oldest proverbs says “Time is money,” and it’s no different for you. When onboarding team members using traditional hiring methods, onboarding a single employee can take around three months.

With IT outsourcing, you’re specifying your requirements, picking your team, signing a contract, and you’re ready to go! Of course, this saves a ton of time regarding the hiring procedure.

4. Grants Access To A New World Full of Talents

When outsourcing, you’re not limited to your country or region in terms of searching for talent. You can pick any specialist from anywhere and always get access to the best of the best.

When the talent pool to choose from gets much larger, you’re sure to partner up with the finest talents working on your project.

5. Team Capacity And Scalability Becomes Highly Flexible

IT outsourcing can give you a sense of “on-demand” service. This is because you can upscale or downscale your team at any time, giving you high flexibility in team management.

When planning to scale your project up or down, you can add or subtract team members according to your needs, and the added flexibility for both you and the team can result in faster development time with maximum optimization.

6. Allows Working With A Self-Managed Team

In outsourcing, you’re always sure to pair up with the best of the best. Here’s the thing: years of expertise have taught them how to work in tandem with other team members regardless of the situation and the project.

So, the development team members create their solutions through communication and collaboration without external management. With a self-managed team, it’s easy to focus on other business objectives, allowing you to multitask.

7. Enables A Higher Amount of Focus On Core Business

As the earlier point mentions, IT outsourcing brings in a self-managed team that can free up your attention so that you can focus on other business processes.

While the external team manages and takes care of itself, you and the internal team can focus on business processes like management, sales, and marketing.

8. Superb Support For Remote Work

In the modern age, remote work is becoming more and more of a norm. With outsourcing, most of your team members are from across the globe, which requires remote work for your project to progress.

IT outsourcing promotes remote work, and modern technologies for video conferencing, remote work platforms, etc., offer great support for remote work, making the entire process highly efficient.

9. Lets You Utilize The Time Differences With 24/7 Services

Time zone difference is inevitable when you’re working with an international team. While it raises a few challenges in terms of communication, you can also use the time difference to your advantage.

When your team is spread worldwide, everyone can be active during their respective time zone work hours, and you always have one or more members active.

This is especially useful when your product has already been launched, and you need constantly online team members to provide customer support around the clock.

Cons of IT Outsourcing

1. You Lack Control Over Process & Management

While it’s true that outsourced teams are self-managed and can ease your burden in terms of overall management, the disadvantage is that it can also take away your control over the entire development process and management.

When you lack control over your project, more than often, the developed product might not be what you wanted, and it can take a lot more time to implement your required changes.

2. Communication and cultural Barriers Can Affect The Workflow

Different cultures have different cultures and languages, which is obvious. However, this difference can hinder communication between the team members.

Another hindrance to communication is the time zone difference. Not everyone can be online all the time, so instant communication is almost impossible.

This results in more time to communicate the required changes between all team members and increases the time it takes to implement them.

3. The Service Provider’s Cost May Rise Higher

Outsourcing service providers usually offer an affordable cost range for any client to get started. But here’s the thing: the cheap option doesn’t always bring quality unless you’re sure who you’re partnering up with.

While most startups and small businesses focus on cutting costs, they often partner up with agencies that offer poor-quality work, resulting in a weaker end-product, and the development time essentially doubles while trying to improve the application, increasing the costs overall.

4. You May Not Have Enough Experience With Remote Teams

While remote work is becoming more and more common, most business owners still don’t have enough experience working with remote teams. This is not necessarily negative since getting accustomed to a new trend takes time.

It can, however, affect the overall tenacity of the team, and inexperienced leadership often results in a failed project or a poor outcome.

5. The Quality May Suffer At Times

The remote communication process is highly optimized and convenient, thanks to countless remote communication software and collaboration tools. However, the communication process can often get delayed due to time zone differences and aforementioned cultural barrier issues.

Communication is the key to the success of any product. When the communication suffers, not all team members understand the proper requirements, and the product quality suffers.

6. Hardware Issues Can Cause Longer Downtimes

Software issues can be fixed even remotely since all it takes for a technician to fix software on any device is simply to connect to it through a remote collaboration tool. In some cases, the fixes are almost instant.

However, hardware fixes don’t work the same way. In the case of faulty hardware, the benefits of remote support go straight out the window.

You cannot fix hardware unless you’re in the direct vicinity of the faulty hardware, resulting in longer downtime until the issue is fixed.

Software Outsourcing With Impala Intech

While there are a few challenging aspects of working with IT outsourcing, it’s evident from the comparison above that the pros outweigh the cons easily. But if you want to leverage IT outsourcing to get the most benefits, you must partner with a trusted vendor.

That’s where Impala Intech comes in. Our extended roster of development teams has extensive experience working on different development scenarios, both on-site and remote.

With our development team on the site, you can rest assured that you will get the best results out of the development cycle as soon as possible, with a pretty affordable rate to sweeten the deal.

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