Running a business isn’t easy, especially one with resource-intensive IT needs. Managing an internal team of IT professionals can be costly and time-consuming, which is why more and more companies are outsourcing their IT to managed service providers. Outsourcing your IT needs to a third-party can lower your costs, reduce the amount of managerial time required to run your business, and speed up your production and deployment of updates and new releases. 

We asked our community of experts for their best IT outsourcing tips, tricks, and success stories, and they came through! Read on to learn how other companies have leveraged MSPs to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.

I’m an entrepreneur with multiple eCommerce businesses in my portfolio. When I started my first website, I was using Siteground hosting and setting up my website’s CSS, WordPress plugins, styling, etc. on my own. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, my average site load speeds were 2-3 seconds. This was a big disadvantage for SEO and user experience, with fewer people coming (and staying) on the website.

It’s at this point that I started outsourcing all my hosting tasks to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). That’s now how I manage most of the websites on my portfolio. They’ve helped me set up CDNs for my websites, moved me from Siteground to Servebolt, and generally optimized everything.

Now my newest website, Shanedutka.com, has an initial load speed of just 1.6 seconds, more than 50% down from those first websites I made.

– Shane Dutka, Founder and CEO, ShaneDutka.com

I’m a CMO with a team of over 20 employees, freelancers, and product testers. Since we’re a large team with unique needs, we often need automation either programmed from scratch or created with tools like Zapier.

In the past, I tried making these automations myself. This did not go so well. We ultimately got the work done, but I’m not a coder so my work was very inefficient. After this, I tried hiring team members who could code but failed to manage them properly due to my inexperience.

I’ve now shifted to outsourcing this kind of work to small teams and individual freelancers I find through UpWork. By having experts from abroad do this work, we’re able to get more automation done than before and save money at the same time. I count that as a win-win.

– George Pitchkhadze, CMO, Thrive Cuisine

Outsourcing IT services is definitely a cheaper option than having an in-house team to look at your computing needs, there are hundreds of IT services out there with thousands of IT professionals who know the ins and outs of computer work. You can save yourself the time and effort by trying to find the perfect employees for your company; however, you would have to be prepared for long training hours and definitely a lot of money spent, something that could be difficult if you’re a small business.

– Shayne Sherman, CEO, Techloris

Two key benefits of IT outsourcing are cost optimization and access to a wider pool of expertise and skills. You also reduce time to market by saving time searching and hiring IT staff and can start developing the project immediately. Agile methodologies used by outsourced teams make your operations more efficient and streamline project development.

One of our clients decided to augment their IT staffing needs to sustain growth and outsourced IT services as well as R&D to fill the gaps and achieve their goals. Within a month, they had a fully functioning team to work on their products and could release new functionalities much faster and more efficient. Results exceeded expectations as productivity was boosted by as much as 50%. The company generated over 5$ million in revenue from its new products. Today about half of their innovation comes from outsourcing partners.

– Dan Kelly, Founder and Senior Partner, The Negotiator Guru

Most of our clients have outsourced their IT operations and found it beneficial for several reasons.

Not only do you get the work done, but also you get tech expertise you can’t get elsewhere, For example, one of our customers is a US investment agency who lacked the expertise with Umbraco CMS. They needed to migrate their website from old legacy software to open-source CMS but weren’t sure if Umbraco was the right fit and how to do it properly. Therefore, they turned to an Umbraco development agency to outsource their migration. As a result, the customer got fast & efficient software migration backed with continuous support and maintenance. Looking for a similarly skilled team in-house would take months of search and would cost at least twice as much. Instead, the customer was sure to get help from professionals with the right tech skills without manually hiring each of them. The team also created a mobile-responsive version and configured CMS to business unique preferences.

I think that another advantage of IT outsourcing is this high level of personalization you get. In other words, you get custom integrations or tech advice that no one else might need.

– Valeriy Ilchenko, CEO, ByteAnt

As a full-service IT company, Resolute has helped many businesses outsource aspects of their IT needs. For some, we’ve helped manage just support or development. Others we’ve stepped in to manage every aspect of their IT environment. These are the benefits we’ve seen.

By outsourcing IT needs, businesses can focus more of their time on aspects critical to their business growth. – Colton De Vos, Marketing Specialist, Resolute Technology Solutions

By outsourcing IT needs, businesses can focus more of their time on aspects critical to their business growth. Companies where IT isn’t a core part of their business often get bogged down with hiring, onboarding, training, and managing IT talent which takes time away from the more strategic aspects of their business. Outsourced IT means these companies have a trusted partner to manage not just the day-to-day IT needs but also provide expert guidance on the go-forward state of their technology. Clients with an IT partner should receive critical advice when it comes to risk management (disaster recovery and cybersecurity), IT asset management (when to update, upgrade, or replace technology assets), strategic planning (organizational design, IT budgeting, and aligning the IT strategy with business objectives), and more.

A number one concern we see from clients debating whether or not to outsource is the human element. No one wants to fire their internal IT team, even if an outsourced partner is a better alternative. We’ve actually taken on and hired a client’s IT team to our business before. By hiring their team, we ensured:

• Minimal job loss
• Their IT team had access to expanded career paths
• We retained advanced knowledge of their IT so less learning required
• Less disruption to the client’s business
• The client no longer had to spend any time managing IT

– Colton De Vos, Marketing Specialist, Resolute Technology Solutions

We have outsourced our IT development to a partner in Morocco. We have gone through 4-5 different providers and have decided to go with this person as she would take time to listen and understand our needs and price it accordingly.

I recommend taking the time to get to know the person who will be doing your development and explain to them your business needs. Of course, pay them for their time. If a project costs $5000, we always include another 10% ($500) as we would like to sit down for an hour or two to go in-depth with what needs to be accomplished. We have been using the same person for over 10 years now and hope we can use her for another 10.

– Alex Kovalenko, Account Manager and Senior IT Recruiter, Kovasys

I believe that outsourcing IT services can help you increase focus on core business, increasing productivity, and competitiveness. If you outsource your IT services, you can focus more on some critical aspects of the company. By outsourcing, you and your team focus on building your brand, investing in research and development, paying attention to the customers, and delivering value-added service at a high level.

Slack, a well-known collaboration tool, outsourced the app and website design for better UX. The company outsourced some work to a design firm, who took care of the app, website, and logo. The outsourcing made it looks, feels, and sounds different from the competitors, and it happened only due to outsourcing the general design concept.

– CJ Xia, VP of Marketing & Sales, Boster Biological Technology

Numerous outsourcing software companies (from Eastern Europe, for example) provide services for a less expensive price range than US companies. Those countries that are well-known for software outsourcing constantly contribute to developing their IT segment, including improvements in technical education, growth in the number of software conferences, IT-events, and hackathons. For example, such an IT-oriented approach has allowed Ukraine to place 8th in international ranking by tech skills with 91.26 points out of 100. 

– Maxim Ivanov, Founder and CEO, Aimprosoft

In cases where IT drains a company’s resources instead of driving its growth, that company risks lagging behind competitors in the long run, even if its financial results are good now. Transforming the IT landscape with in-house resources is likely to be too slow and low-efficient as employees are used to routine operations and instinctively resist changes. In such a situation, outsourcing is a way out.

Outsourcing IT services allows a business to optimize the costs, speed, and reliability of their IT operations and frees up resources for digital transformation. – Nikolay Kurayev, CEO, ScienceSoft

Outsourcing IT services allows a business to optimize the costs, speed, and reliability of their IT operations and frees up resources for digital transformation. Based on ScienceSoft’s experience in rendering IT outsourcing services, businesses can expect to cut IT expenses by 1.5-2.5 times and increase business processes automation by 30-200% with outsourcing.

– Nikolay Kurayev, CEO, ScienceSoft

One of the main advantages of IT outsourcing is its cost-efficiency. Having in-house developers is often much more expensive, while their skillset usually the same. If you live in the US or Europe and hire local IT experts, their rate would be times higher in comparison to specialists from popular outsourcing destinations like Ukraine.

Outsourcing services also let you start working on a software idea almost as soon as you get it. You don’t need to spend time looking for developers and all other employees involved in the process. All that’s necessary is to find one suitable vendor.

Moreover, an outsourced team requires less managerial efforts from the client, so all you have to do is check up on the development progress with your vendor’s PM. Thus, you spend even less time and effort on the project while getting a custom application that fits your specific requirements and needs. 

– Vladlen Shulepov, CEO, Riseapps

One of the most important benefits of IT outsourcing is the cost advantage. The general difference in wages between, say, Northern America and Western Europe is quite striking. This consequently allows startups and other companies to get access to professional services for more affordable prices.

A good example to support this point would be WhatsApp. At the beginning of their story, they would have the customer support and operations office in the US, while the development part was done by outsourcing from Russia.

Another point in favor of IT outsourcing is the ability to access qualified specialists. In case a company has assessed its talent and noticed that one particular field is lacking, whether you need to find a temporary solution for a task or diversify your company’s strength, outsourcing specialists to fill the gap might turn out to be a great idea.

For example, the back end of GitHub was developer mostly by an outsourced developer. Scott Chacon, current GitHub CIO, was initially hired by the co-founder Chris Wanstrath to write Gist (the sharing feature of GitHub) on an outsourced basis.

Another thing outsourcing allows you to do is focus on core issues, which is a huge plus. With outsourcing, you can comfortably stay focused on the main points while getting high quality IT services from outsourced vendors. This goes to any business that doesn’t necessarily rely on IT as its base, but rather uses it to expand influence, make a stronger image, automate a process, gain an additional market door, and better customer awareness.

– Tatsiana Kerimova, CEO, Orangesoft

Outsourced IT services have become a trend for SMBs so they can focus on growing their business by cutting down on maintaining an in-house team of IT professionals. In our case, we’ve tapped a small IT firm to handle the work on our behalf so we can focus on what we do best. It’s a cost-effective measure considering that IT is very critical for business development and yet, we don’t have the bandwidth to do it considering our very busy work hours.

– Michael Hammelburger, CEO, Cost Reduction Consultants