IT Outsourcing Part 4 – To Outsource or Not to Outsource?
I’ve covered most of the commonly available outsourcing options for small business in my previous posts, but what happens when you think you need to bring the resource In-House?
There are a couple of easy scenarios where bringing someone in-house makes pretty clear sense. The most obvious one is that if you can bring a person (or people) in-house full time for less than you spend on outsourcing. The other is that if you have a relatively complicated network (things like render farms and web server farms come to mind) where outsourcing isn’t all that practical. The other main reason why bringing your support in house is if you want someone on staff fully dedicated to only working on the IT for your business.
If you have a smaller network whose primary users are essentially standard office users you really should be looking to see if outsourcing is a better fit. When working as a consultant as both as a Sole Proprietor and as part of a break-fix consultancy I could support networks with 50 users relatively easily – especially when I had other technicians I could count on for assistance. I think that a qualified in-house tech can likely support at least 100 users in a relatively ‘normal’ environment where a bulk of the users work primarily Microsoft Office and a couple of other line of business applications.
It really comes down to cost vs. complexity vs. availability. If you don’t mind spending $50k (and likely more) per year on a full time tech, if you have a large number users, or need someone every single day bringing someone in house might be for your business. If not – go find a good MSP. They’ll likely save you some money and should be able to take good care of your network.