When evaluating IT responsibilities for in-house and outsourced IT functions, there are benefits to both scenarios, and the right decision will be unique to each organization. The main benefit of having internal IT services is that your own employees understand and support the unique IT needs of your organization. One of the many benefits of outsourcing IT services is that you can leverage the Managed Service Provider’s (MSP) deep technical expertise in a particular area or multiple areas.
Outsourced IT Services with an MSP
First, let's start off with three major benefits of utilizing an MSP:
- MSPs provide services for multiple customer environments of differing complexity. This provides more experience and economies of scale when it comes to delivering services and troubleshooting issues.
- MSPs staff resources with diverse skill sets and deep expertise: breadth and depth that are challenging to develop in-house.
- Many MSPs like Ascend are available 24×7, 365 days per year, a level of availability that is difficult to replicate economically.
Outsourcing IT services enable you to expand your internal IT capabilities without needing significant capital investment or a commitment to hiring more full-time personnel. Companies of all sizes and industries utilize outsourcing to reallocate their internal resources.
By shifting day–to–day tasks off their internal team's plate, they can free up resources that simply keep your organization running. The other way to do that is by outsourcing for specific skill sets that you may not have internally to advance the initiatives and projects that support the organization’s goals and objectives.
In-House IT
Internal IT will understand the unique needs as well as the specialization of your organization. Having a team is beneficial for specialty software, custom ERP systems, and organizations with multiple internal dependencies. It also gives your organization in-house control over your, or your customer's, data.
Having internal IT provides consistency for your end-users. The employees know who they are dealing with every day and learn what internal resources have which skill sets; sometimes, they just like the style of one person over another – we are all human. On the downside, this can be disruptive to IT as employees call their “favorite” IT staffer, thereby sidelining whatever project or unique initiative that IT employee was engaged in at the time. In the long run, it can lead to your IT team getting overloaded with one-off tasks, losing focus, and becoming overworked.
By relying solely on internal IT, most organizations that are under a few thousand users will have internal IT staff act as a “jack of all trades” with “MacGyver-like” skills. The benefit is that the longer employees spend working at the organization, the more familiar they will be with your organization’s unique applications, business processes, and internal/external dependencies.
The big drawback is that the more time they spend mastering those things, the less familiar they’ll be with the broader technology landscape outside of your organization, including cutting-edge information technology trends. According to McKinsey, this "skills gap" is reported to be affecting or anticipated by 87% of companies as our technology grows and shifts. This applies especially to cybersecurity roles which have maintained a 0% unemployment rate that we've been seeing in the news for the last 5+ years and is only expected to get worse.
Don't let your internal IT get bogged down and overworked.
Hybrid Solution
Ultimately, we find that many organizations land in a hybrid model, which many find to be a perfect balance. In this approach, your IT team can focus on efficiencies and improvements to their daily responsibilities, and still have time for larger projects and initiatives specific to your organization’s goals. Ascend can assist with the most technical projects, from cloud infrastructure to cybersecurity, and provide the heavy lifting and depth of technical knowledge that would take internal IT years to achieve.
Since our experts can provide all IT services, we have clients that are “all in” where Ascend is their IT department. Most often, our Managed Service offerings fit within a hybrid model in which our team is responsible for some tasks (like patching, backup & recovery, or endpoint protection), and the in-house IT team is responsible for others.
Our services can be customized to support your organization’s goals. Explore which model is best for you and talk to an expert. We can partner with you to achieve your organizational goals and overall IT strategy.
