Digital infrastructure management and other services to outsource to your IT vendor

 Today, you can delegate almost every part of your business to a professional vendor specializing in the service in question. Cost reduction is among the significant reasons companies opt for hiring third parties to perform some of their essential functions; however, it is not the only one.According to Deloitte reports of 2020 and 2021, apart from decreasing expenditures, companies that choose to outsource IT services expect that thanks to professional IT vendors, their working processes will be standardized and optimized, they will increase their advantage over competitors, and boost their digital transformation.Unfortunately, the abundance of similar concepts regarding IT services might leave you at a loss. To make the market of digital services outsourcing clearer for you, we have gathered five notions that describe the range of services you can delegate to a third party. Let’s move from general to specific.

Digital infrastructure management

Digital infrastructure is the environment of all digital actions that your company and employees make. If it’s well-developed, your work processes are smooth, and you rarely face incidents that can interrupt your workflow. Several years ago, physical buildings were stuffed with equipment, massive data centers, etc. After the pandemic lockdowns, businesses understood that public clouds where they can deploy their corporate networks are the future. Digital infrastructure is also a cobweb of interconnected ecosystems and partnerships necessary for the fluent functionality of your business. The management of this colossal infrastructure should be performed with high professionalism, which is one of the reasons why customers often search for skilled experts in digital infrastructure management in outstaffing companies.Let’s dive deeper, though – what’s inside the digital infrastructure?

ITSM: IT service management outsourcing

IT service management or ITSM refers to the concept that design, development, support, and other IT aspects should be provided as a service; IT services should be customer-oriented and respond to key business requests. ITSM’s goal is to facilitate the granting of IT services to customers while emphasizing the crucial role of the team for the business. Let’s break down some of the key tasks of IT service management.

1. Workflow optimization. Every team member and every department should know their duties and understand the level of their engagement in the project. Workflow processes should be optimized so that the team can promptly react to changing business tasks or customers’ requirements. 
2. Help-desk. Whatever queries your employees have, the ITSM department should be able to provide a solution. That can be partially DevOps tasks, like setting firewalls, or assistance with hardware and office equipment.
3. Troubleshooting. This includes incident management, preventing the team from facing incidents, and fast restoration of systems and infrastructure after critical IT issues.
4. Customer support. The key task of ITSM is providing value to the customer. One of the ways to do so is by working through queries from the clients and providing them with customer support.

Most of these tasks can be performed remotely, so you can easily delegate ITSM to offshore outsourcing companies. You can either find an IT vendor that will offer you a comprehensive solution for all parts of ITSM or distribute IT service management among highly-qualified individuals who would reinforce your in-house technical team.

Custom software development outsourcing

MWDN’s inner statistics show that most customers searching for an IT outsourcing company want developers to transform their idea into the software. Every program, platform, application, or algorithm you run on your tablet, mobile, PC, or IoT device is software. These are just some of the examples of software: 

• an algorithm that helps your recruiters find the best employees;
• an online service for medical billing and coding for your hospital;
• an idle game for mobile;
• an app that helps your engineers design roofs;
• an anonymous messenger;
• an application for calorie counting; or 
• a custom e-commerce website. 

All these ideas can be brought to life by a team of designers, developers, and QA engineers. If you don’t have specialists of this kind in your company, think of delegating software development in full to the outsourcing company. If you already have a development team, but it lacks some specific expertise, consider reinforcing your existing technical team with several remote talents from an outstaffing company.According to Deloitte’s annual reports on outsourcing software development several years ago, money-saving was the main reason why companies opted for IT vendors. Today, clients also emphasize the importance of speed to the market, a higher level of agility and flexibility of IT outsourcing companies, and access to the best tools, practices, and specialists. 

Cybersecurity and IT security

When renting an office facility, you immediately hire a security company with all the necessary equipment to keep track of all the doors and windows on your premises. Your digital infrastructure requires just the same level of precautions as your brick-and-mortar buildings. For this reason, companies opt to delegate their IT security and cybersecurity to specialists.Just think of all the levels of defense you need to apply to your sensitive data! If you’ve developed an application where the client puts in their private information or bank details, you need to guarantee no data leaks whatsoever. To protect data from fraudulent assaults, you have to keep an eye on the application, host, and network. As a rule, such an effect is achieved with the use of the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability). This model helps to secure information within your organization.Other aspects of your infrastructure that need to be monitored and protected:

• cloud storages,
• wireless connections, 
• databases, 
• servers, 
• firewalls, and 
• devices of your employees and your clients.

As IT security and cybersecurity are highly sensitive parts of your business, you have to choose a reliable managed service provider with hands-on experience. MWDN experts, for example, have worked on several projects directly connected to developing safe IT infrastructures. One of them is Twingate, where our tech talents helped create a service providing their clients with secure remote access to any device or application. Apart from that, among our employees are skilled Cybersecurity experts and DevSecOps specialists who will help manage your IT infrastructure to keep it safe and secure.

IT service desk outsourcing

As part of the ITSM, service desk functions are often outsourced separately from other IT works. The reason behind this selectivity is that the help desk usually has to help company employees on the spot – in the office, as even today, there are still many hardware issues that cannot be tackled remotely. For this reason, the IT service desk is usually outsourced onshore, meaning in the same city or at least in the same region where the office facilities of the customer are situated.Delegating help desk functions is a way out for small companies which don’t have a budget for an in-house service desk department. 

Summing up

Outsourcing digital infrastructure management, as well as any of its parts, like IT security or IT service management, is a way to start or proceed with your digital transformation. As this is a strategic step, consider choosing a true partner that will be interested in your success and evolution. To do so, you can choose an outstaffing company like MWDN. We have more than 20 years of experience in software development and infrastructure management and will gladly help you transform your idea into an app or your legacy infrastructure into the modern cloud environment that will boost the productivity of your company.