One of the realities of corporate life is that data has become one of our main currencies. Virtually anything we do, whether it is sales, fitness, communication, bookkeeping, or learning has become part of some technology or application. This has improved our lives in many ways – we can share certain pieces of data with selected groups or audiences, and that many aspects of organisational management have become easier to deal with, for instance stock-taking, data warehousing and IT management. This also means that we are now dealing with a lot of data and that many different types of data have to be organised and managed. IT management as a service has become a business in itself, and because technology has become more powerful and easier to manage, many businesses are faced with a crucial choice: is it time to outsource IT management as a service to another company?

The truth is that modern data and its management is becoming more cumbersome and not many in-house departments have the skills or the experience to manage all the different challenges their internal IT presents. Keeping track of big data, software, hardware, users, functions, and reporting is becoming more difficult, and as more IT-related components or applications are added to make the business function better, the internal IT department cannot keep up. This is why so many business managers are now outsourcing this to external companies that provide IT management as a service.

When to consider outsourcing your IT management as a service:

• High IT costs: Outsourcing may seem like an unnecessary cost, but studies prove that better management of IT resources actually result in lower costs. For instance, specialised internal staff do not have to be appointed, developed, trained, and managed to deal with the ongoing and escalating challenges of internal IT if another company can do this. If you deal with a company that provide IT management as a service at a fixed cost, budgeting is more effective and unexpected costs due to IT problems reduced.

• High risk internally: When organisations grow to the point where there is a big infrastructural risk, it helps to get rid of some of that risk by handing it over to a third party. As a result, IT staff can focus on other IT-related issues and the company becomes more dynamic and better managed, reducing the long-term risk of the company.

• Overburdened resources: An internal IT department can be limited, and companies might not want to keep adding to the staff compliment every time the IT department becomes overburdened with IT issues. Offloading some or all of the IT-related responsibilities to an organisation that provide high quality IT management as a service means that no extra IT staff is needed and that the existing team can focus on better internal management of IT resources in partnership with a third party.

There are many other times when outsourcing your IT management to an external service provider is impossible to avoid – such as when you do not have enough in-house expertise, or when the company is undergoing changes that affect the IT infrastructure. At Sequoia we specialise in the provision of high quality IT management as a service to many high-profile clients across the country. Give us a call if it is time to outsource your IT function.