Businesses are relying more and more on IT to:

  • Increase productivity
  • Increase efficiencies
  • Drive company growth.

Therefore having technical expertise your business can rely on is essential to the everyday running of your business.

But should you hire someone internally, or outsource to an external IT provider?

Let’s have a look at the cost of hiring someone in house (these are approximate and conservative figures):

Salary – £25000

Recruitment – £4000 (plus the time taken out of the business to recruit the right person)

Training – £2000 (plus the indirect cost of the person preparing and doing the training)

Office Space at £15/square foot – £9000

Equipment & Phone – £1000

Employers NI at 12% – £3000

Pension at 3% – £750

The total cost of employing that person is roughly £44750 which is £3729/month.

This is without factoring in any management time input for managing a junior person and time spent on professional development and appraisals.

This can be a large part of your wage bill, especially for a smaller organisation – even if you’re only planning to recruit someone part-time

So let’s compare that to the cost of paying an outsourced provider. The cost of outsourcing is calculated per computer and network that is managed. Therefore you would have to have a company of well over 180 staff for the benefits of having someone inhouse to outweigh the significant costs.

That’s without considering that you would probably need an additional 1-2 IT staff members to service that many employees.

If we break that down to per person:

A 100 person organisation would cost £37/person

A 50 person organisation would cost £75/person

A 25 person organisation would cost £149/person

and our prices work out significantly lower than that.

So yes, you can make huge savings outsourcing your IT, plus getting a huge number of benefits too.

What are the benefits of an outsourced provider?

To find out what outsourcing IT in your business would cost please contact us and a member of our team will be in contact to discuss how we can help.

But what other benefits would you get?

For a 50 person organisation you would need at least 1 employed person dealing with the day to day running of IT.

For a fraction of the cost, using an outsourced provider, you would benefit from:

  • Support throughout the year regardless of holidays and sickness
  • Support on every business day
  • 24/7 or shift cover, which you won’t get with one member of staff,
  • Monitoring of systems 24/7
  • A system that tracks work/outstanding issues
  • Access to a range of technical skills (technical analyst, helpdesk technician, network engineer, principal consultant) on a need for basis
  • Expertise to work on specific in-house projects
  • IT Security experts
  • No training expense
  • No recruitment fess or management time taken up filling vacancies
  • No overheads including equipment and phones

Using an outsourced provider that can offer you all this, plus has the capability of taking on additional projects (such as moving to the cloud, moving office, sitting with the board etc) can hugely benefit your organisation to:

  • Be more efficient/productive
  • Drive company growth
  • Improve employees quality of life

Every business needs some IT support and our qualified IT experts think clearly about your IT and your business. So if you are considering outsourcing your IT, or are unhappy with your current provider, please contact us and a member of our team will be in contact to discuss how we can help you.

What are the benefits to larger organisations who in general will have some form of IT inhouse?

As an organisation grows the requirements for IT will grow too, and the IT team’s day will get filled with everyday employee activities.

Any strategy or larger infrastructure projects would be perfectly suited to outsourcing.

For a fraction of the cost you can get the capabilities and business acumen of an IT Director who will sit with your board, devise a strategy linked to the organisations aims and objectives and translate that strategy into practical steps for the IT team to manage.

If your business wants to use IT to:

  • gain a competitive advantage
  • attract and retain talent
  • increase productivity
  • and ultimately drive growth

then outsourcing specific IT experts will allow you to do this faster, at a lower cost & more efficiently.

To find out how our highly experienced consultants can help your business be accountable for IT Strategy, and translating commercial requirements into effective IT solutions, then contact us.

Lucid Networks. Thinking differently about your IT