Every organization is unique; there is no magic formula. Many businesses outsource their IT because:

• technology is not the core business;
• an IT outsourcing company will generally have a larger pool of resources, providing better coverage and economies of scale than a handful of internal IT employees;
• IT support organizations have a larger focus on training, certification, and tools which results in higher efficiency.

So why do some firms insource? When a firm is large enough that they can justify an IT department where they are fully utilizing more than one person for strictly IT, it begins to make sense.

One factor to consider when evaluating insourcing, outsourcing, and also the technology partners you work with, are the shifts towards managed services and cloud computing. For the purposes of this article, I’d like to focus on managed services. What is managed services? This is a term that is used in the IT world to describe the shift towards a more automated/cloud model for delivery of IT services. Managed service providers leverage remote monitoring and management tools that connect to your systems via your internet connection to help improve system reliability and performance. Having the best IT people is still essential, but improved automation allows managed service providers to provide more efficient support, focus more time proactively planning, and spend less time reacting to items that are broken.

I rarely use the term ‘managed services’ in any of my sales or marketing material since it’s really a technical term and I’ve seen it misused by some IT providers that aren’t really operating under a managed services model. However, there are many providers, including Total Networks, that have made the proper investments and shift away from a ‘break-fix’ model to ‘managed services’ for IT support, and it’s something worth considering.

Whether or not you have insourced or outsourced IT, working with a managed services provider is something worthwhile, since the automation tools that managed services providers offer can be leveraged in either situation. I have clients with in-house IT that love the tools that we provide. They also appreciate being able to call us if they have an issue where they can use a little help or need coverage while they are out of the office. There is generally an advantage to outsource monitoring and management tools from a cost and functionality standpoint. For example, if you lose power or network connectivity, an in-house monitoring system generally won’t be able to alert anybody if it’s located in your office. Of course, system down alerting isn’t the primary objective. Good monitoring software will check network systems constantly, and alert your technology team when systems need attention, allowing you to proactively address root cause issues before they create downtime. While IT staff could monitor your network manually, it can be time consuming and is subject to human error or oversight. Properly managed software that checks your systems around the clock won’t miss anything and is apt to alert your team to issues far sooner to help ensure that your accounting team have systems that are always working optimally.

However you choose to staff your IT needs, it’s important that your staff is focused on the fundamental IT responsibilities to ensure that you don’t have avoidable issues such as outages, malware infections, performance issues, or failure to restore data from backup.