When you first got into the business, web development services were probably your responsibility. Or at least, someone within your small or medium-sized business knew enough about IT services that you kept all of that in-house. It made a lot of sense at the time. It saved you money and, it covered all your business needs on-site. It was a perfect situation for a business of your size.
However, your business expanded over the years to where you need to start looking at other solutions. In this article, we will explore the main reasons why companies will outsource their web development projects instead of keeping them in-house.
Why Companies Outsource
Outsourcing is the use of qualified independent contractors who are not employed by the company. These contractors work per job or can be hired on for extended periods. Many work remotely, either from home or another office location.
These arrangements save you a lot of money as you do not have to provide normal employee benefits. For many small and medium-sized businesses, outsourcing is a logical and affordable option.
They receive the assistance of a fully qualified person working on behalf of their company without investment in all the expenses related to having an additional employee on the job. Think of outsourcing in the same way an office would hire a “temp” to take care of specific projects or tasks. Once the job is done, the temp is gone.
That is how outsourcing works. You temporarily use qualified people to complete tasks that are not long-term in nature.
Outsourcing Reduces Labour Costs
How is this possible? Well, it is easy to understand how outsourcing can cut down on labor costs when you consider the expenses related to operating an in-house IT department. Think about that for a moment. The costs come primarily from maintenance and staff training, which is not cheap.
By outsourcing web development projects, these fixed costs are quickly converted to variable costs. A variable cost is one that becomes an expense only when you require it.
When you outsource this kind of work, your project benefits from the expertise of a highly-trained tech. However, you don’t have the costs associated with the training, hiring, and insurance expenses of having that person on staff.
Essentially, someone else has paid for those things and you get to utilize the end product.
Outsourcing Maintains A Flow of Service
The ongoing evolution of technology keeps making it more complex. This means that staying current with software and hardware is a difficult task and with competition growing daily, there are challenges to maintaining innovative web development solutions.
What can be accomplished in-house may not meet the level of what is available through outsourcing. By outsourcing to a company that has kept up with all the advances made in technology, there should be a flow of service that transitions from in-house to outsourced seamlessly.
In other words, there is no downtime as one source gets brought up to speed to meet current technological levels. Avoid this altogether just by outsourcing where upgrading happens automatically.
Outsourcing Keeps You Up With Industry Standards
Staying current with industry standards is costly. With technology always changing, and web development reliant on maintaining compliance, it is difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to stay up-to-date. This is not an issue when you outsource.
That is because the independent contractor you hire for a task will have been trained on industry standards and will be participating in ongoing educational programs to maintain their understanding of changes to these guidelines and requirements.
It is not always feasible to keep upgrading staff knowledge of such information which makes it an affordable option to outsource to someone who has been keeping up with industry standards and regulatory guidelines.
Outsourcing Lets You Focus On Business
One of the most important benefits of outsourcing is one that will directly impact you and how you interact with your business.
For small and medium-sized business owners/operators, being able to have an independent contractor taking care of web development projects frees you up to do other things.
This is particularly important if the tasks you outsource are typically those that you have normally handled yourself. By taking these jobs away and providing them to a contracted professional, you can put your efforts towards other tasks that you are best suited to work on.
Besides, spending too much time on web development projects will pull you away from the important things related to the daily operation of your business. Outsourcing puts you back in the driver’s seat.
Outsourcing Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan
If all of your crucial data exists only on in-house storage facilities, a disaster that results in data loss could potentially cripple your business.
When you outsource things like IT services, your data is stored off-site. Or at least a backup of your data is stored somewhere other than in-house. This protects the data stored on-site as a copy exists off-site.
At least this way, if there is a serious situation that destroys or corrupts your data, there is a backup available. You could do this by outsourcing data storage to a cloud server site or to a freelance contractor that specializes in data storage and recovery.
The bottom line is that outsourcing this could prove to be a benefit if there is a data breach, a loss of data or your company is attacked by hackers or ransomware.
Final Thoughts
Outsourcing has been around for a very long time. Only it wasn’t known as outsourcing at the time. Hiring temporary workers is a standard practice used by all kinds of businesses regardless of size.
With the constant technology changes, it makes good business sense to outsource such tasks as web development projects and other IT needs.
This gets these items away from being in-house and affords your business access to experts in the field at a fraction of the cost of training someone on staff to assume these roles.
Outsourcing is cost-effective and can make a difference with your business.
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Pranjal Bora works as head of Product Management at Digital Authority Partners, a Chicago-based custom website development agency.
