Whether or not your business should choose an in-house or outsourced IT approach very much depends on your specific wants and needs.
By looking through the following advantages and disadvantages of each solution, you’ll be better positioned to know which options make sense for your company.
Advantages of Outsourcing Your IT Support
One of the main advantages of outsourcing your IT support is that you gain access to a team of experts.
If you hire in-house members of staff to handle your IT, you could hire a couple of highly knowledgeable people, but it’s unlikely that your staff members will have enough well-rounded experience to deal with every issue that arises.
On the other hand, when you outsource, you can be certain there will always be an expert on hand to solve any issues quickly and knowledgeably.
Furthermore, outsourcing can often be cost-effective because you will typically just pay a monthly fee or a predefined hourly rate instead of paying full-time salaries and employee benefits to in-house IT staff.
Disadvantages of Outsourcing Your IT Support
It’s possible that your outsourced IT support staff won’t be available immediately when you need them. After all, they’ll have other clients to serve.
So, if you do go down the outsourcing route, make sure the provider you choose is able to respond to your needs quickly.
Another potential downside of outsourcing is that you could face unexpected costs. If you don’t choose your IT support provider wisely, there could be hidden costs and they could encourage you to overinvest in technology that you don’t really need.
That leads to another potential disadvantage, which is having a perceived lack of control.
Not only could an outsourced company persuade you to implement tech and operational approaches you don’t really need. They could also have different workflows and business processes that are different from yours and which conflict with your company.
Advantages of Using In-house IT Support
When you go with an in-house solution, you’ll have more predictable costs, in terms of things like the expense of hardware, software, and employee salaries.
You’ll also gain easy access to the right types of IT professionals whenever you need them, which means issues can potentially be solved more quickly.
Also, when you have in-house IT support, the employees will fully understand your IT systems and will be able to anticipate your business needs to tailor solutions accordingly.
Disadvantages of Using In-house IT Support
When you have an in-house team, there’s always the chance that team members could miss days due to things like sickness, in which case resolutions to IT problems could become delayed, unlike outsourcing to the right IT support provider.
Also, your in-house team is likely to not possess as many in-depth skills as a team of outsourced experts.
The Hybrid Approach
You always have the option of going with a hybrid approach.
For instance, you could use an in-house team for day-to-day IT tasks like setting up email accounts while using an outsourced team for fixing unexpected IT issues. You could then gain the best of both worlds.
You could also use hybrid IT solutions like a hybrid cloud observability solution.
For instance, when you choose the most convenient plan from SolarWinds, you can gain access to hybrid cloud observability that gives you deep visibility into your IT infrastructure and services.
And by onboarding infrastructure, apps, and services into your IT monitoring system, you can do things like enable cross-domain correlation, enhance collaboration, and reduce IT silos.
The Takeaway
At the end of the day, only you can decide which approach is right for your company’s IT needs.
Carefully consider the above advantages and disadvantages of in-house and outsourced approaches to determine what makes sense for your business.
