Hire or outsource?
Outsource or hire?
We hear this question all the time from business owners, just like you.
Here is what we DO know: It is a difficult question to answer with a lot of variables.
Let’s talk about the pros and cons with the caveat that your own business may have different priorities and needs.
IT costs vary dramatically by business
The first item we’re going to look at is cost knowing that IT costs vary dramatically by business and their industry.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like everything to be consistent and uniform. This means all your staff should have similar hardware, network requirements, and the proper permissions to your line-of-business applications. All your security and licenses need to be up to date, especially if you are running complex systems.
With this consistency and scalability in place, your costs are typically dramatically less than hiring internally as a W-2 employee(s).
The difference between outsourced and internal is familiarity
With internal IT staff, however, they’ll know your processes because they’ve been doing them since the start.
The difference between outsourced and internal is familiarity.
There’s something to be said for personalization of an internal IT department where they feel like part of your company whereas outsourcing it to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) feel like a separate entity.
With hiring someone internally, an often-overlooked aspect of their role is that they’re usually overworked with struggles of falling behind on tasks. It’s difficult to balance the task work for the person, and god forbid they ever take a vacation and can’t be reached.
In the situation of outsourcing your IT, it’s a much smoother fit because you can rely on their expertise knowing they will have seen a setup similar to yours and dealt with it many times before. Further they will always have a technician available, even after hours.
For a larger business, economy of scale is important because it means a good MSP might cost more, but complexity of the business may be too much for internal IT to handle. Larger businesses and one is that are growing usually get a dedicated account manager, a team for themselves, and priority helpdesk support.
That doesn’t mean you can handle everything
That doesn’t mean that a medium sized business can handle everything.
You may benefit by having the first layer being the MSP who can handle support calls, trouble tickets, and basic password resets but need help on more complicated tasks.
The second issue is cybersecurity and security which most MSP’s already having processes in place to handle security and cybersecurity issues and compliance. Some of them may even specialize in certain things such as HIPAA compliance but also be specialized in other industries.
In a hybrid model, MSP’s also are able to incorporate solutions on a larger scale which may not be available to smaller businesses such as monitoring and cybersecurity solutions which they can deploy across their clients.
When controlling your IT, you need to consider completely outsourcing, hiring internally, and a hybrid model because the health of your business depends on it.
For medium/larger businesses, a managed Service Provider can assist in guiding your internal department to help with new strategies, expertise, all while removing the burden of a heavy workload when it becomes too much.
Outsourcing, hiring internally, and hybrid can be tricky. We specialize in helping you determine the best approach for your New England business. Click here to learn more and get started.