Outsourcing or Insourcing, the answer lies in the middle.

Following a long period of businesses and organisations outsourcing their core IT functions to large external suppliers in an attempt to lower costs, the advent of ‘as-a-service’ IT available through the cloud is causing many functions and processes to be brought back in-house, i.e. insourced.

This is becoming more common in both the public and private sector, with CIOs or other strategic figures tasked with untangling the web of contracts, partners, and staff to deliver one, manageable IT service centrally. This is of course no easy feat, and balancing reducing costs of external suppliers whilst supporting or even improving current IT services is a juggling act which has high stakes if reducing external services causes a drop in service levels.

With so many organisations racing towards ‘transformation’ and cloud services, the need for agility and to adapt at pace to changes in the market has never been higher. The trouble is, many outsourcing agreements are in fact older than the concept of modern cloud computing, meaning the SLAs, contracts, service delivery and customer service are not reflective of modern IT. In reaction to this, many organisations are looking to fully insource and handle all of their IT internally, believing the lack of infrastructure requirements along with the need for agility means their outsource partner is redundant and the only solution is to move all IT services in house.

This is again, a big leap to make, but with organisations such as Astra Zenica saving $350m a year by moving away from outsourcing, the evidence is clear that something needs to change in the traditional model. You may be wondering, why risual, an outsourcing provider are discussing the benefits of insourcing and cloud computing – but the reality is there are many different types of outsourcing partner, and our model isn’t the traditional approach – it’s somewhere in the middle of insourcing and outsourcing.

As detailed in our video with Derby City Council, we helped them save millions by moving away from a traditional outsourcing contract, much the same as Astra Zenica and many other organisations stuck with monolithic organisations who see customers as just another line in their job list to be completed before a deadline. The approach of leaping from this world, to a totally home grown internal IT team with all the skills and experience to grow your internal IT services, and deal with any day to day issues is a big, expensive ask.

What is often the best choice is to transition out of a multi-year contact into a rolling yearly flexible contract which can be scaled up or down dependant on your service needs. You cannot onboard, embed and upskill a whole new IT team within twelve months, you need to change your IT service in the short and long term, and only a partner willing to build a flexible contract with your changing needs in mind is going to give you the strength in depth to deal with today’s problems and the expertise to help you build for the future.

We offer a lot of our customers a combined package with our education department, which means we can cover and maintain your infrastructure, whilst your own IT team can access the training materials and work alongside our managed services team to get both academic and practical training to develop the skills to take on working on these technologies. We can also offer IT Service Management consultancy to help your organisation operate in an efficient, secure and productive way, helping you get the most not only from our managed service partner but from your long-term IT management.

Take a look at the breadth of skills and technologies risual can assist with below, and you will see that while the old way of outsourcing may be over, a modern agile approach to managed services is only now starting to demonstrate its long-term value to an organisation.

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