The question sounds simple: hire your own technician, or hand IT over to an external company. In practice it is a decision about cost, risk and continuity of operation, not just about a monthly invoice. Below we compare the two models honestly, without pretending that one always wins. Because it does not.

Costs, but counted to the end

The most common mistake is comparing the outsourcing fee with an administrator’s salary alone. This comparison always comes out misleading, because it leaves out half the bill.

With an in-house team, on top of net pay you add:

  • Social contributions and other employment costs.
  • Hardware, licences for administrative tools and monitoring systems.
  • Training and certifications to keep up with technology.
  • Recruitment and the time to onboard a new person.

With outsourcing you pay a predictable fee, and most of the above costs are already hidden in it and spread across the provider’s many clients. That does not mean outsourcing is always cheaper. It means that at a small and medium scale it usually works out cheaper for the same real scope, while with a large, specific environment the difference can reverse.

In practice the break-even point does not lie in the number of computers, but in how many hours of IT work the company actually generates per month. If one administrator would spend half their time waiting for tickets, you are paying for readiness, not work.

Risk, or what happens when something goes wrong

An in-house team gives a sense of control, but a one-person team is the risk of knowledge locked in a single head. When such a person leaves, they often take passwords, context and the whole history of decisions with them. Rebuilding this can cost more than a year of service.

Outsourcing shifts part of the risk onto the provider, but introduces another: dependence on an external company and its quality. That is why the contract and documentation are crucial here. Data, licences and accounts must stay on your side, and the environment should be described so that it can be handed over further. The same, incidentally, applies to an in-house team, only more rarely does anyone keep an eye on it.

Availability of skills

One administrator, even a very good one, does not know everything equally well. Networks, servers, Microsoft 365, backup, security and virtualisation are now separate specialisations. An in-house team in an SME usually covers them shallowly, and for a harder problem reaches for external support anyway.

Outsourcing gives access to a team with different skills at once. A helpdesk ticket will be handled by someone other than a server migration or a security incident. For the company this means you do not have to hire four specialists to have four competencies. If what you mainly need is a quick response to everyday user problems, a well-organised IT helpdesk often solves the matter more cheaply and quickly than an in-house employee who happens to be busy with something else.

Continuity of operation

This is the area where an in-house team fares worst, though it is rarely mentioned at the decision stage. One person goes on holiday, gets ill and works set hours. A failure on Friday after they leave waits until Monday.

Outsourcing assumes replaceability by definition. A team provides continuity regardless of holidays, and good contracts describe this with a service level, meaning an SLA with a specific response and resolution time. It is worth being careful with the marketing here, though. An SLA has value only when the provider takes on the consequences of failing to meet it. The clause in the contract alone guarantees nothing.

Scaling in both directions

Companies grow, but sometimes they also shrink or change their working model. An in-house team scales in steps: another position means a new recruitment and a fixed cost you cannot drop overnight when needs fall.

Outsourcing scales more smoothly. Adding positions, another server or a new location usually means a change of scope, not building a team from scratch. It also works the other way, when a company shrinks. For an organisation with variable, seasonal or fast-growing demand, this flexibility can matter more than price alone.

When to choose which

Honestly: there is no single rule here, but there are typical situations.

  • A small or medium company without extensive infrastructure usually gains the most from outsourcing, because it gets a team and continuity for a fraction of the cost of one position.
  • A large, specific environment with its own unique system may need a person on site who knows it inside out.
  • A mixed model is often the healthiest. An internal coordinator or administrator handles strategic matters and contact with the business, while an external partner takes on day-to-day support, security and on-call duty.

The last variant works especially well in companies that have grown enough that one person can no longer cope, but not yet enough to build a full department.

If you are not sure which side of the line your company is on, start by calculating how many hours of IT work you actually use per month and which skills you lack. On that basis we are glad to show how managed IT services or full IT outsourcing would look in your case, without pushing a model that happens to suit us. The decision should follow from the numbers anyway, not from an advertising slogan.