If you are seeking to curb IT expenses through outsourcing, one safe bet might be to outsource disaster recovery to a service provider.
The recently released Computer Economics IT Outsourcing Statistics 2015/2016 study finds that outsourcing of disaster recovery has the highest potential for successfully lowering costs when compared with 10 other commonly outsourced functions.
As shown in Figure 7 from the study, among IT organizations that outsource disaster recovery, 92% say their costs are the same as or lower than when performing the function in-house. That is not only well ahead of desktop support outsourcing, which always gets high marks in this annual study for cost effectiveness, but also well ahead of disaster recovery’s seventh-place ranking the previous year.
“IT organizations outsource disaster recovery primarily to reduce risk rather than save money, and this is what the study has generally shown in the past,” said John Longwell, vice president of research for Computer Economics, Irvine, Calif. “We think one reason for the change is the maturation of disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Using on-demand cloud infrastructure for disaster recovery can be cost effective if you don’t need to maintain the excess capacity.”
Here are other key findings from our IT Outsourcing Statistics study this year:
In the full study, we profile outsourcing activity for 11 IT functions: application development, application hosting, application maintenance, data center operations, database administration, desktop support, disaster recovery services, help desk services, IT security, network operations, and web/e-commerce systems.
For each IT function, we measure the frequency and level of outsourcing. We also look at the current plans of IT organizations to increase or decrease the amount of work they outsource. Finally, we examine the customer experience to assess whether organizations are successfully lowering costs or improving service through outsourcing.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, IT Outsourcing Statistics 2015/2016. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).
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