Outsourcing in IT – a way to invest and save your money or blow it away: part 2

Transfer of responsibility retional expenditure and access to high-class specialists: those are arguments for outsorcing of the IT provesses by companies.

If you want to ensure maximum efficiency and the proper performance of business applications and systems, you need to work on the foundations – a top-notch infrastructure. The costs of renting or building a server room may vary greatly, depending on the original situation, technical parameters or capacity. However, both modernization and work from scratch require many expenses related to the adaptation of rooms, purchase of equipment and tools (power generators, server cabinets, wiring, software, servers, network equipment), costs of maintenance, energy bills, wages for administrators and database operators, etc. Moreover, you need to set aside funds for repairs, further modernization and better infrastructure, as well as accept the risk of losses due to failures.

Stable infrastructure and expenses

Keeping the SAP system in partners’ hands

Creators of software made by e.g. SAP (a pioneer in ERP) provide their clients with a number of solutions which ensure the continuity of performance and access to the knowledge base. The most popular solutions are maintenance and service websites.

The foundation of SAP Maintenance is comprehensive support for the platform users. The service provides full access to updates and the knowledge base. The subscription includes the Support Academy, which provides theoretical training, sessions with experts and online workshops supervised by an instructor.

Our observations suggest that most companies consider SAP Maintenance as the cost of access to updates, payable by all SAP users. However, there is much more to it than that,” says Michał Guzek, Managing Partner at Hicron, an IT system provider. “Maintenance also means unlimited access to knowledge and expert assistance. The clients can attend training, look up issues and access system efficiency reports.

Due to their complexity and importance for the entire company, IT systems require ongoing servicing assistance. In case of any problems with the platform, the user can count on fast responses from consultants. The service website can be accessed as needed or on the basis of a permanent agreement. Most companies go for the latter. Ensuring continuity of performance and 24/7 assistance are the main expectations of companies which outsource their IT.

In business, it’s important to control your expenses. With constant support, the client can count on the assistance of consultants for the period defined in the agreement without any additional expenses related to e.g. investing in narrow IT competencies and the like. Yearly savings can reach even 20 percent, says Hicron’s Michał Guzek. The service website is crucial for the performance of the service level agreements, or SLA. SLA concerns the continuous adjustment and improvement of the quality of the system by its provider. This applies not only to ERP, but to any IT services, like Java, .Net or PHP. The SLA factor is higher if the platform is more stable and developed as expected by the user.

Outsourcing of IT services guarantees security

Everyone can see how important a good IT system is after the first serious failure – then, all the corporate processes slow down or grind to a halt.

Outsourcing of IT services ensures higher security and quality of service compared to using internal corporate resources. An agreement signed with the outsourcing company defines the time for response and final removal of a failure. Furthermore, outsourcing improves the security of data. If an outsourcing company loses or leaks client data, it can go out of business. Hence, they use top security measures in order to comply with data security policies.

Outsourcing companies usually have access to better solutions than companies with their core business elsewhere. External IT resources provide access to a professional data center and regulated work standards which mitigate the risk of failure. Moreover, maintaining a system on external servers improves the stability of that system, as subcontractors supervise the continuity of performance around the clock.

Read part 1.