IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
What It Means To Your Company

IT infrastructure outsourcing means one company contracting another company with experts to serve your technology needs, and to provide IT infrastructure services more efficiently than you can on your own.

These outsourcers can be responsible for:

• Some or all of an organization's hardware and software components,
• Network services, firewalls, network management,
• Mainframe computers, servers,
• Help desk support,
• Desktop and laptop PCs, printers,
• Operating systems,
• Maintenance and administration,
• E-mail management, and
• Site and system security, backup and recovery management.

Their aim in all cases is to take proactive measures and perform corrective actions to maximize the uptime and availability of your organization's IT infrastructure.

To meet the demands of IT infrastructure outsourcing, executives, such as yourself, are increasingly being pushed to:

• Reduce the total cost of ownership including:
  • lower technical administration costs,
  • lower help desk costs,
  • lower implementation costs,
  • reduce IT infrastructure downtime
• Provide 24/7 infrastructure services beyond your current capacity.
• Need access to higher technical skills that are too costly for you to acquire in-house.
• Upgrade or expand existing networks (LANs and WANs).
• Build new networks to include required security features.
• Improve budget planning.
• Build more secure, reliable, and scalable web sites.

Steps You Must Take

Here are your main action items involved in implementing IT infrastructure outsourcing effectively:

1. Ensure the outsourcers you consider are capable of meeting regulatory compliance requirements such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SAS 70 Compliance).
2. Ensure the outsourcers maintain adequate data security policies and practices, to reduce the risk of losing sensitive data.
3. Make sure they have your industry specific expertise in infrastructure outsourcing.
4. Gain access to information that will help you receive more accurate request for proposals from these outsourcing providers.
5. Make sure they can provide you with scalable solutions that adapt not only to your organization's changing needs, but also to changes in information technology.
6. Make sure your outsourcer has the right expertise, tools and technologies to proactively monitor your environment to ensure maximum uptime rather than your current reactive fire fighting environment.
7. Can they help you reduce the risks associated with your current infrastructure, and can they create a working strategy for mitigating any future risk?
8. Do they provide disaster recovery and security services and functionalities?
9. Make sure you target a minimum savings of 20 to 30% in the outsourcing arrangement in order to see value.
10. You will need to spend from 6 to 12 months evaluating your company's complete IT processes in order to record all your strengths, gaps, costs and key requirements. It is the key to being able to map out a detailed service-level agreement with your infrastructure provider.

Your Current IT Infrastructure Cost

To implement IT infrastructure outsourcing effectively, you'll need to closely examine your current IT infrastructure costs.

• Account for all the costs associated with employing good technical resources and tools to support your infrastructure?
• Initial hardware investment (servers, mainframes) and what will this cost in the future as the company grows?
• Annual IT staff costs including salaries, training, certification, general business overhead?
• Software Licenses?
• 24/7 Support Management, if you are not providing this now, what would it cost you if you needed to provide this service?
• External contractors, what do they cost when you need them?
• Data centre costs including power and air conditioning, security?
• Insurance costs?
• How much does downtime cost your business?
  • Hardware Supplier Response for Upgrades or Repairs?
  • Installation of new equipment?
  • IT staff sick, vacation, turnover?
  • When the system goes down - what is it costing your business?

The Bottom Line

IT infrastructure supporting is not one of your core business activities and is not a direct revenue generating function; however it does have a direct bearing on your bottom line.

So leave infrastructure management to those whose core business is exactly that! Get busy working on a plan for IT infrastructure outsourcing for your company. We've got the information you need to prepare yourself.

Getting More Information

If you'd like to learn more about IT infrastructure management and outsourcing, we have lots more information to help you out.

Our offer of professional help is a serious one. First of all, you'll find that while the site information is exhaustive, it appears in a brief, easy-to-read, often bulleted, executive style.

You won't get bogged down in details while browsing this site, but we DO have extensive in-depth information for you if you want or need it. It's free and all you have to do is ask!

Start right now by going to the Contact Us page and completing the simple online form. You'll receive immediate access to two authoritative industry books, which our site sponsor will mail to you at no cost.

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