Backsourcing Your Outsourced IT

Outsourcing your company’s IT services is an easy way to cut back on IT costs. For years, outsourced IT has been a growing trend with more companies making the switch, but just because your businesses has outsourced its technology services, doesn’t mean that backsourcing isn’t a valid option.

Backsourcing IT?
Backsourcing IT is when a business that’s signed up for outsourced IT services decides that it’s in their best interest to switch back to taking care of these services in-house. Now, you may be thinking, “Why is an outsourced IT company like Computerware even mentioning the idea of backsourcing IT? If everybody switched back to overseeing their own IT, wouldn’t that be a threat to their business model?”

If we were a one-trick-pony technology company that only offered outsourced IT, then you bet we would defend our bread-and-butter service if a client was thinking about moving on from it--but this isn’t how technology works. It’s the nature of technology to change, and for a company’s technology needs to change as their business grows.

Finding Your Business the Best Solution is Our Top Priority
For example, a small business may have a growth strategy of initially signing up for outsourced IT to save money on their IT costs, and then using the savings to invest in growth. When a strategy like this works, the small business is no longer a small business. Now that the organization is larger and has more resources, they may reevaluate how their IT is managed and determine that they can now afford to hire their own IT techs to oversee operations.

Organizations that go this route have reasons for doing so that are unique to their business. Maybe they do work that’s extremely sensitive in nature and the shareholders would feel better if all company data was hosted in-house rather than in the cloud. Despite the public cloud being a reliable and secure option for storing corporate data, some decision makers may be gun-shy about the cloud with the stories about breaches making front page headlines--like September’s incident where sensitive photographs of celebrities were stolen from iCloud, Apple's public cloud service. An incident like this is quite different than a business storing its data to the cloud, but you wouldn’t get that from reading celebrity gossip websites.

Backsourcing IT is a Growing Trend
Stan Lepeak, global research director for KPMG Advisory, gives CIO an estimate about how more businesses are expected to backsource their IT services in the near future: "Of the IT services historically outsourced, 20-to-30 percent will be brought back in-house as buyers are more comfortable to create retained organizations that not only govern the services, but start to move more into operational control of the services.”

If you’re looking to increase control of your organization’s data and systems by backsourcing your IT service, then give Computerware a call at (703) 821-8200 and let us assist you with this major move. At Computerware, we’re dedicated to making your technology work for you. Most of the time, this means outsourcing a company’s IT with our managed IT services, but in some unique cases, the best move for an organization’s needs may mean backsourcing--and that’s okay by us.

Out, back, in, sideways, or whatever other direction you want to take your company’s technology, we can lead the way and make sure that your systems fit your needs so that you’re set for success!