The top 5 benefits of outsourcing are generally accepted as being:
1. Minimize capital expenditure
Moving from capital to operational expenditure makes sense at the beginning of the year or project but because of the nature of long term IT projects there are still many legacy systems where the investment has been made in previous years.
Maybe consider using Cloud services for new IT projects – but the benefits of Cloud include consolidation so you are missing a trick by paying for both environments.
Consider that OpEx on cloud can be very unpredictable under ‘pay-as-you-go’ models. Consider that overages from storage, bandwidth and even CPU cycles with some cloud providers (not DediPower!) mean you can’t budget from month to month and you need to consider how your rises in traffic will really relate to sales.
2. Redirect energy and personnel into the core business
Consider the level of management you are expecting from your cloud provider, consider the amount of support you expect from them. Then think about how much time is spent internally dealing with hardware issues. Research shows only minimal time is spent ‘in the datacenter’ dealing with hardware faults. Most of the time SysAdmins spend is on user issues, general software administration and patching and upgrading systems. With an un-managed cloud server these issues will remain pertinent and instead you are spending money on internal resources as well as expenditure for an outsourced company to run the infrastructure.
3. Free your executive team from day-to-day process problems
Fewer staff means lower exec overhead (again only true when redirecting resources by not concentrating on user issues and software management). How are you expecting to alleviate those resources, which problems are you trying to remove? Cloud computing is not a golden bullet.
What about data management? Having data elsewhere doesn’t alleviate common data management problems. You still need to consider backups, disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
4. Focus scarce resources on mission-critical projects
Operational Expenditure gives you the benefit of being able to being able to move and reallocate resources, whether personnel or computing. With OpEx and the added flexibility of cloud services, companies can benefit from being able to quickly change projects and change resources.
5. Get access to specialized skills
This is potentially the biggest benefit of cloud computing, there are ever changing technologies with cloud, virtualisation, storage and grid computing. As your companies business is (probably) not to spend its time researching, developing and testing on these new technologies. By outsourcing to a cloud provider you can make the most of the bleeding edge technologies without having the risk of constantly being relied on as the only person in the company with experience in a new technology