This makes me feel safe.

The worst possible example of outsourcing.

Outsourcing is the biggest con that the business world has ever pulled off. You cannot put a price on having qualified IT people embedded within your organization. A support person sitting in a cubicle thousands of miles may be able to help with basic user questions about how to use office applications. But they will never have the kind of perspective on your business to actually help someone do their job better or find a way to streamline your computer use. I've spent nearly 15 years working in medium to large IT support and you would not believe the amount of damage outsourcing your IT can do to your business. Granted, this is my profession and I am biased but my observations come from experience. Inevitably, you are forcing your employees to either learn more about computers or you have to spend more money training them. This either costs entirely too much money, negating the reason for outsourcing in the first place, or results in a HUGE reduction in productivity.

Outsourcing and consulting companies are the crack dealers of the IT world. They lure you in by saying they are going to reduce your support cost by some magical number to get you hooked. Once they have complete control over your systems they start cranking up the support contract cost and usually you'll end up paying some where between 15-30% more for the same support by the forth year. At this point the cost of breaking your relationship with vendor is so prohibitive that you have no choice but to stay with them. You may get lucky and one of your support vendor's competitors will swoop in and offer you yet another deal that you can't refuse to switch over to them. You'll go through at least one quarter of crippling issues with your major systems as the support infrastructure changes. This will effect your entire business to varying degrees and after that fun you'll end up back at the beginning of the same cycle.


There is no replacement for having your own IT staff that knows your business and its employees. Don't be fooled by the pitch...