What an internal hire actually costs
The salary is the part everyone counts. The rest:
- Visa, medical and insurance
- End-of-service accrual
- Recruitment cost, and the cost again when they leave
- Training and certifications to keep skills current
- Tools and licences that a provider would otherwise spread across clients
- The weeks of reduced coverage during notice, recruitment and handover
Then the structural problems, which cost more than any of the above. One person cannot cover annual leave, illness or a weekend incident. One person cannot be strong at networking and security and cloud and the ERP. And one person leaving takes the entire institutional memory of your estate with them, unless somebody insisted on documentation, which somebody usually did not.
Where internal genuinely wins
This is not a one-sided argument.
Deep knowledge of your specific business. Someone who has sat in your operations meetings for three years understands why the process is strange, and that context is hard to buy.
Being present. Walking to someone's desk solves things that tickets do not. For companies where staff are not comfortable with remote support, this is worth real money.
Scale. Past a certain size the economics simply flip, and a team you employ is cheaper and more responsive than an equivalent bought externally.
Specialised systems. If your business runs on something unusual that external providers do not know, the learning curve may not be worth buying repeatedly.
Where outsourcing wins
Breadth. You get access to several specialisms rather than one generalist, and nobody has to become an expert in a thing they will touch twice a year.
Continuity. Holidays, illness and resignations are the provider's problem to solve, not a gap in your coverage.
Cost predictability. A contracted figure rather than a salary plus unpredictable project spend.
Documentation by necessity. A provider has to write things down because their own staff rotate. Clients are often surprised that outsourcing produces better documentation than their internal arrangement did.
Escalation. When something serious breaks, more people can be put on it than you employ.
What most companies actually end up with
A hybrid, and usually not by design. It works well when designed deliberately.
The common split: one internal person who knows the business, owns the relationships and handles anything needing presence, supported by a provider covering infrastructure, security, out-of-hours and the specialisms. The internal person stops being the single point of failure and starts being the person who understands what the business needs.
The failure mode is leaving the split undefined, so each side assumes the other is handling backups. Write it down, name an owner for every area, and review it when either side changes.
A rough rule
Under twenty-five people, outsourcing nearly always wins. Between twenty-five and a hundred, it depends on how specialised your systems are and how much presence your staff need. Above a hundred, an internal team is usually right, with a provider for infrastructure, security and overflow.
These are starting points for a conversation, not a formula. The right answer depends on what your technology does for your business, which is a question worth answering before the cost comparison, not after it.
Asked before,
answered straight
Can an outsourced provider work alongside our existing IT person?
Yes, and it is often the best arrangement. The important part is agreeing the split in writing before starting, with a named owner for every area, so nothing sits in the gap between you.
What happens to our knowledge if we outsource?
It should improve, because a provider has to document for its own staff. Make the asset register and documentation a contractual deliverable that belongs to you, and you end up with better records than most internal arrangements produce.
Is outsourcing less secure?
It depends entirely on the provider. A good one brings monitoring, patching discipline and incident procedures that a single internal person cannot sustain. A poor one adds an access path into your systems with weak controls. Ask how they manage their own access, how it is logged, and what happens to it when one of their staff leaves.
Work it out properly.
Tell us your headcount, your systems and what currently keeps breaking. We will give you an honest view, including when the answer is to hire rather than to call us.