Outsourcing Risks

With the growing need to cut costs, companies are looking towards the use of outsourcing firms for things like IT services and support. One of the services that companies are outsourcing is data storage. At first thought you think why would you ever put your company's information in the hands of a third party vendor? You then need to step back and think that there must be SLA's and other services in place to protect company data otherwise why would this be an option. As long as there is a mutual agreement stating that data is safe and if there is any deviation from that agreement then there would be legal action taken then I would feel better about having data stored offsite. Having data offsite already alleviates the need for a backup solution and also the need for having storage offsite for DR (disaster recovery) purposes. Also with this 3rd party vendor taking over the backup solution, frees up that responsibility for the onsite IT staff which in turn could be a money saver. With the need for more storage, having a backup solution onsite is very expensive especially when natural disaster as of late is driving up the price of high capacity storage drives. Letting a 3rd party vendor eat that cost along with the backup software helps making the transition easier to swallow. Now this doesn't mean that all storage would be offsite. There would still be storage for things that people use on a regular basis like email and personal storage. Having the day to day storage offsite would cause slowdowns and possibly take a hit in production output. This offsite storage would be for long term information that a business needs to hold on to like old employee records and old financial information.

Another service that can be outsourced are the applications that a company's uses and how they access them. This is simply a way to save money by accessing and running applications via your web browser instead of having that application installed on your computer. This saves your company money without having to buy copies of a program for every computer. Some computers may not even need to have the program installed but when purchasing software you need to account for every computer which drives up the price. With vendors that provide application hosting, you only get charged either when the application is used or monthly/annually. Not having the software installed saves time with updates when they are needed. The vendor would do all of that behind the scenes and more than likely won't give any downtime. Another plus for this option is not needing to install special software when someone changes desks or computers. They simply have access to these applications no matter where they sit. A drawback to this would be if there is any company data associated with this application then it would reside with the vendor and not onsite.

The use of a 3rd party to support a company's desktop computers is another way of saving money.