The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the ’80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the ’90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it’s all about the cloud.
Of course, each of these buzzwords reflects an actual trend in the IT business. The Internet did spring up in the ’90s and changed the way we do almost everything. Virtualization has revolutionized software development and testing as must as it has deployment. And the combination of the Internet and virtualization has given us the cloud.
This nebulous entity brings huge resources into the reach of normal people and, of course, businesses. One star of the cloud era is Amazon with its huge online virtual stores and its web hosting/web storage offerings.
Amazon’s EC2 service (Elastic Cloud) allows businesses to expand and contract their online resources according to their current needs. It’s flexible and yet simultaneously cost effective, especially when compared to the costs of permanently buying servers, managed services and/or entering into co-location contracts.
Outsourcing is the elastic cloud for the IT needs of your company. From engineering management to build-and-release management, from IT services management to data server operations, a professional IT outsourcing company allows your business to remain flexible and utilize resources only when you need them.
Long term staffing commitments can place pressure on your business in terms of taxes, employee benefits, healthcare packages, pension schemes, physical resources (like office space) and hardware resources (like desktop computers, phones, mobile devices, etc.).
However using the “elastic” approach of outsourcing IT tasks means that your long-term commitments are reduced but yet the manpower, skill sets and expertise needed to move your business forward remain available.
Outsourcing makes it possible to gain the competitive edge by tapping into expertise that’s not available internally within your business. Any new activity that your business starts needs the right skills to carry it through to a successful completion. If your business lacks these skills you either need to find permanent employees with the right skills, train your existing staff or use an outside resource.
Using outsourcing, rather than finding new staff, allows your business to remain flexible and it brings fresh, outside expertise to help you ramp up your next project quickly. In the meantime your existing staff can continue to innovate and drive your business forward.
