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Outsourcing IT infrastructure management: what’s in it for you?
A hitlist of benefits for those who prefer to focus on their core competencies
Business today is driven by technology – so if you’re doing business successfully, you’re IT-savvy practically by default. If you’re bigger than garage-sized, you probably have your own IT experts in house. That team is a skilled bunch of people, or they wouldn’t be working for you.
So why is outsourcing IT infrastructure so popular? Surely if you’ve got the resources in house, that’s the logical place to use them?
Not exactly. Success is about making the right decisions, and often the best decision with IT infrastructure is not to manage it yourself. Your inhouse techies have other work to do, after all: helping your employees with their daily problems, developing new applications that deliver your corporate strategy. The deepest parts of the back office – the platform your business rests on – needs dedicated attention, by people expert in doing it.
That’s how Strypes works, with our nearsurance model that both embeds a team within your business and takes responsibility for outputs, just as an inhouse team would. It’s proving itself across Europe and the USA, thanks to our 500+ developers in Bulgaria and client-facing engagements across the Netherlands and the EU.
If you want more proof, here’s our definitive list of the reasons it’s a good idea to outsource management of your IT infrastructure .
Reason #1: basic economics!
Let’s start at the top, with the most fundamental reason to outsource your IT infrastructure management – or indeed, to outsource anything at all. It’s due to a very basic principle of economics: the magic of trade . Whether you call it guns-or-butter, the division of labour, or Riccardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, they’re all terms for the same idea: doing what you’re best at maximises your output.
If Peter is an architect, he knows a lot about buildings. But he doesn’t do the wiring or decorating; he calls in Eddie the electrician and Paul the painter, because they’ll do those jobs faster and with greater expertise. In turn, Paul doesn’t make the paint himself; he buys it from the store. Everyone’s adding value where they can add most of it.
Your IT infrastructure is a vital part of your business – but it’s a cost centre, not the product you’re selling. That’s where Strypes comes in: managing it is our business. IT infrastructure management is the product we’re selling. It’s what we do.
Reason #2: Because the fundamentals matter
It might not sound glamorous, but simple stuff like agreeing a set of naming conventions or a calendar for rollouts save masses of time over the long run. And the long run is what we’re here for. Because it builds a solid base.
Your organisation isn’t static. People move jobs, corporate strategy changes, departmental priorities go up and down. But if you’ve got a comprehensive, honest, and easy-to-understand set of practices for your IT, it makes transitions and migrations easier when you’re onboarding new staff, changing your operational processes, or transforming your entire business. Because when new needs emerge, your IT people know what needs to be done. Nothing is ad-hoc or left to chance.
Outsourced IT management keeps everyone on the same side, by building a base of consistent, repeatable practices that aid shared understanding. Which means changes happen with less friction. Get the basics right first.
Reason #3: Because it’s too easy to get it wrong
By “wrong”, we mean “costly”. Because there are many ways to get IT infrastructure functioning on a good-enough basis – but “good enough” might be covering up huge unnecessary costs.
Cloud capacity costs money; if you’re only using it during office hours, why pay for it all night? What if a neglected application is taking 5x the computational resources it needs? A bit of active management would cut that down to size. And if you’re moving your entire infrastructure cloudwards, it’s also a huge opportunity to look at the cost sinks and where you’re overpaying for things you don’t use. That’s what management is all about: a process of continuous improvement.
At Strypes, outsourcing carries an added benefit. We don’t just take your brief ; we take responsibility . When we accept a project, any deviations from expected outcomes are on us. And yes, that means we pay for them. We’re that confident we can deliver for you, we offer that guarantee . (Note: we don’t have to pay that often!)
Reason #4: The right partner can provide long-term support
Strypes handles clients with 15,000 projects in their GitHub and Azure tech stacks – and does it for years at a time, with a consistent team of people. Yes, we think about your success next quarter – but we’re also thinking about your success a decade from now.
IT infrastructure, after all, has to evolve and change with time. Once, the cloud wasn’t for anything mission-critical; now it’s the best choice. GitHub was once a small tool for bedroom hackers; now it’s enterprise-ready. Over time, the mix of technologies in your IT infrastructure will develop. With an experienced partner who knows all the trends and shifts of the broader market, you can stay on the curve.
Reason #5: You’re amortising costs every day
It sounds like something only of interest to accountants, but amortization is an important factor in IT outsourcing. If you keep all your infrastructure management inhouse, you’ve got to train people, incentivise them, keep them focused, negotiate their salaries … absorbing every single cost yourself.
Outsourcing takes those costs out of your business. And puts them in a place where you’re taking advantage of all the other companies your partner works with. You’re benefiting from their experience with the world’s biggest companies; sharing datacenter racks with businesses like yours; working with people who’ve got data models and tech stacks already designed for what you want to do. Outsourcing amortizes your IT costs – and amortizing is a smart move.
Reason #6: It gives you your own palace guard
A city needs its police. And your business infrastructure needs watchmen, too. Bad actors are everywhere, seeking to get their grubby hands on your confidential information, take advantage of holes in your network, and compromise your people. Don’t let them.
Outsourcing to a partner like Strypes gives you enterprise-strength monitoring and security – some of it using human skill and judgement, some of it using cutting-edge tools and technologies for seeing trouble ahead and neutralising threats, in addition to basic best practices like applying updates and patches immediately and automatically.
Security at both core and perimeter is a natural part of an outsourced partner’s service. Best of all, it happens invisibly: you don’t even need to worry about it, since we’re doing the same thing for hundreds of other companies, each a vital customer to us. Outsourcing lowers security risks … by raising the barrier against threats.
Reason #7: The way it lets you control costs
Let’s be blunt: employing people is hard, and carries risks. Finding them, to start with. Then the long process of onboarding. Then helping them become productive. And if they can’t, well, “de-hiring” people isn’t fun for anyone.
We don’t want to create yet another “as-a-service” acronym, but that’s what you get with Strypes – IT infrastructure management as a service. A simple fee, no employee onboarding to worry about. And simplicity helps you control costs.
Reason #8: Treat an outsourced team as an inhouse one
The best outsourced partners don’t feel like an outsource. They work alongside your own employees, often in your own office; they stick around for years, becoming trusted colleagues and friends. You’re getting all the benefits of outside expertise, without the costs and risks of building that capability inhouse.
One caveat: this isn’t true of all IT services providers. But it is true of Strypes. Our nearsurance model puts a client-facing team of business professionals right there in your office: trained analysts who understand your business challenges and design solutions that answer them. While our technical team of hardcore developers sits elsewhere, mainly in our cost-effective base in Bulgaria: they turn those plans into applications and data structures that deliver.
It’s outsourced. But if you want, it can also be in your office, close to your business. And if you don’t want that? They’ll still be with you every day – via videoconferencing, Slack, any channel you want.
Reason #9: It adds redundancy to the mix
Keeping all your IT infrastructure management in house is like keeping all your eggs in one basket. You can fix it if one part goes wrong. But with resources all in the same place or using the same people, one big incident can destroy your entire business, years of work going up in smoke.
Outsourcing spreads your risk. A cloud model puts your data and applications in a protected offsite space; remote expertise can be dialled up or down from afar as you need it; new technologies can be tested and revised elsewhere before being rolled into your operational processes. Backups, failovers, and burst capacity are there as standard.
Reason #10: You can access a worldwide web of talent
Redundancy of systems is useful, yes. But so is redundancy of people. When you hire, you’re fishing in a limited pond: perhaps just the city you’re based in. But when you outsource, you can make use of expertise wherever it resides.
Our home base – Bulgaria – has long been known for the most creative coders in the business at some of the most competitive fee structures in the world, with broad and deep skills ready to go to work for you. And when your outsourced team needs to get bigger or smaller, it can happen quickly, since we already have those people on staff and know where to find more when we need them. With Strypes as your outsource, you’ll never be scrambling to find people.
Reason #11: Improved IT efficiency, everywhere
Your inhouse team has a core set of responsibilities – perhaps they’re developing applications, training users, embedding new processes within your company. The last thing they want to be doing is troubleshooting your IT infrastructure every time there’s a problem.
Outsourcing management of that infrastructure gives them back their time – so they can do the job you need them to do. And do it better.
Reason #12: Trust and comfort of a job well done
Our last reason on this little list is a little more emotional, but just as important to keeping your business safe and sound: the human factor.
For thousands of years, long before IT was a thing, people on the old Silk Roads and market squares did the sensible thing: traded with people they knew. Because they trusted that person’s reputation, or heard good things about them from a friend. (It’s what makes free-market capitalism the perfect system: everyone trading value for value without violence or coercion.)
That still matters in the world today. In fact, it’s vital. And it’s something we at Strypes take very seriously. Long-term relationships are our primary goal: we want your IT infrastructure to deliver results for you every day, year after year. It’s how we measure our success.
So don’t neglect the soft-and-fuzzy side of an outsourcing engagement. Look across our customer base, and you’ll see friendships and warm bonds of trust everywhere; people who genuinely enjoy working with each other. Such relationships create obligations and understandings that make an outsourcing arrangement run smoothly. It may even be the biggest benefit of outsourcing your IT infrastructure management – the idea that people matter.
CONCLUSION
Nearsurance: The Strypes way of outsourcing
Strypes’ unique work model combines our expertise in IT implementations and software development with the benefits of nearshoring.
Download our Nearshurance whitepaper and read more about the process.