1. The concept of “Peak” & “Off-peak” is wearing off.
Earlier businesses used to have clear peak & off-peak hours. Today, the customers are demanding more from businesses, and you never know if your site is going to get important business at 1PM or 1AM. Even if you’re into a traditional business with a physical store, still a lot of customers do their homework online before approaching a store. As businesses go international, every hour in the clock starts to become a peak time where you can’t afford to have a system down. An offshore team is a good solution to maintain your systems online and provide incident response during your local off hours.
2. “Off-Peak” & “On-Call” onsite engineers are a big operational cost.
Whether its US, Europe or Australia, even having day time IT specialists is an expensive deal. Having regular off-peak staff adds a big weight to your operational costs. If you’re in charge of managing an IT operations team, you already know some of the maintenance work is best scheduled when the load is minimal, even when the thin line between peak & off-peak is wearing off. Making your operations team to do regular night time maintenance would slowly start to pile the pressure on them. I’ve seen plenty of instances where talented onsite engineers quit when they cannot cope with the demands of being on call and getting paged at nights & weekends.
3. Running a truly 24/7 IT operation team with the time zone advantage.
Think of a day where you have a load of work pending to be done before the end of the day. What if you could get some of that work completed by the time when your team arrive to work tomorrow? That’s exactly what happens with off-shore teams which convert your IT operations into a more efficient operation with faster response time. Most of the organizations are already hosting their IT environments either in remote collocated data centers or cloud – So remotely managing IT operations from anywhere in the world is not a problem anymore.
4. Cost effectiveness
Having an experienced VMWare or AWS or Kubernetes onsite specialist is going to cost a fortune. Getting help from an onsite consultancy firm is going to still end up getting a jaw dropping bill at the end of the day. We’ve seen an instance where a US consultant was called in to implement a Kubernetes cluster for a price tag where you could have an offshore Kubernetes consultant work for a whole year.
5. Having a certified team
Lot of organizations benefit in various ways by having a certified team of specialists. Other than having the expertise to get the work done, it might be beneficial to win new contracts, or to retain partnership status with tech vendors. But spending your time & money on getting your existing team certified or bringing in certified talent is costly & time consuming. Adding an already certified offshore team of specialists as an extension to your team could ensure that your onsite team could focus on their core tasks.
6. Get maintenance projects done
You might have a lot of maintenance projects to get done such as version upgrades & patch management. These tasks are obviously important for your organizations’ security, smooth operation & regulatory compliance. However, your team might rarely get the time to focus on these tasks as they are fully tied with new feature deliveries driving the company revenue. An offshore team could get through your project backlog and ensure that your environment is kept in an optimal & compliant state.
7. Save capital expenditure
Having another IT team at your office real estate is not going to make your finance department happy. You would need to purchase equipment, incur hiring & other HR costs such as employee insurance etc. and the list goes on. You would not need to worry about the CapEx of setting a new team when you move with an offshore operations team.
8. Flexibility & Scalability
When you have the need to expand your business, take a low-risk growth strategy by going offshore. This allows you to see how your projects progress without the risks of having full time employees and needing to later downsize. Same applies when you have temporary projects where you need extra capacity of human resources. With the rapid pace the world is changing, having the agility to quickly build up teams would give your organization a competitive edge.
9. A team of well experienced team members
Often team members in offshore teams work on various global projects of different scales & tech stack etc. So, you could possibly benefit the collective knowledge and experience that an experienced offshore team have. By having an ability to pick and choose the engineers you want in your team, you could ensure that your offshore team has the skill set and the experience to bring value addition to your organization.
10. Ability for your onsite staff to have a better work life balance.
During the holiday season, everyone wants to spend time with their loved Ones. It’s always a challenge to have staff online to ensure that your business operation continue to run smoothly during holidays. This is where your offshoring team could make you a hero within your local teams. By introducing a “follow the sun” model for incident response, your local staff does not need to be woken from their sleep, bringing a better work life balance to your onsite teams.
CMS is an ISO-27001 certified organization based in Sri Lanka with affiliated sales offices in Belgium & Hong Kong. With 20+ years of experience providing bespoke software engineering & IT operation teams to US and EU SMEs, CMS could help your organization to evaluate the feasibility of a strategic offshore partnership.
