IT infrastructure is not enough to deploy – it needs to be managed, critical indicators monitored, and failures prevented and corrected. And here are two options that need to be compared: staff augmentation vs managed services.
So, in this article, we will understand what staff augmentation is and what are its special differences from managed services. And also consider various features of staff augmentation and managed services.
Managed services model
Managed IT services (outsourcing) enable you to swiftly locate a low-cost contractor to do specific work for the client organization.
At the same time, the customer is not responsible for workplace organization or problem solutions (for example, official employment, paying taxes, insurance, etc.). He is also not in charge of overseeing the work procedures carried out by the contractor’s employees.
This saves the customer time, allows them to discover any professionals (with any credentials and considerable expertise), and necessitates reduced charges (since, in some countries, the pace of IT development is much lower than in countries with highly developed economies).
However, there are several limitations to this employment strategy, most of which are connected to the lack of transparency in the development of service charges (dishonest contractors can calculate man-hours to their advantage). Then there might be a high number of fixes as a result of a misunderstanding of the final product requirements.
Who needs managed services?
As a rule, Cloud Managed Services are individual solutions, and a range of services is selected, taking into account corporate requirements. In general, managed services are suitable for the following:
- Large companies that want to offload the IT department, free up employees’ time for solving key tasks, or, conversely, need the support of highly specialized experts to migrate to the cloud or launch innovative IT products. In the latter case, working with outsourcers helps to increase the expertise of the company’s employees through consultations and collaboration with the provider’s experts. The acquired knowledge and skills can then be applied to projects within the company.
- Small and medium businesses – Managed Services allow you to save on maintaining your own infrastructure and sometimes even do without your own IT department.
- Startups – Managed Services allow you to quickly launch and test business ideas without hiring additional IT experts.
More often, Managed Services are used if the company does not have its own IT department, but there are infrastructure maintenance tasks, you need to offload your own employees, or it is difficult or expensive to hire specialists with the necessary expertise.
Staff augmentation services model
Let us now discuss the definition of Staffing Services. Employees are recruited to the staff (typically by a different staffing agency) under this strategy, and you have complete control over all phases of the development process (or a manager you appoint takes the lead).
The main difference between this type of office work and typical office work with extended staff is that these additional employees might be situated in another nation and operate in an office arranged by a specific staffing agency.
The entire employment process, according to IT staffing services, looks like this:
Speaking of the ultimate benefits of temporary staffing services, they include:
- Employee mobility (you can plan a business trip to your office);
- Pricing transparency for services (you manage how many and which of your staff spend hours on other duties);
- Easier search for new workers (you will not be limited by geographical association, unlike in the search for long-term office personnel);
- Maximum commitment to the job (workers will be involved solely in the implementation of your project, rather than, as is common in outsourcing, when contractors can work on many projects concurrently);
- The ability to choose labor with reduced rates (for example, Eastern European coders charge far less for their services than their Western counterparts);
- High level of dependability (the staffing agency, which is the legal employer of your new employees, has all legal responsibility for the staff growth agreement).
- The ability to exercise complete control over a project at any stage of development (which is especially important for startups).
Despite the undeniable benefits of Staffing Services, this approach is not appropriate for customers who are unable to manage the development process or for those who expect to locate a team for a complicated project in less than a week (as it may take longer to find specialists with a special level qualification).
When Managed Services are better than Staff augmentation services
Costs
With Staff augmentation services, you need to maintain an IT department with a sufficient number of specialists, organize emergency system recovery in case of failures, and in some cases, provide round-the-clock support for the operation of services. This is expensive and often only makes sense for large companies.
If the company uses management outsourcing, you can reduce the staff of specialists or do without your own IT department. This is especially important for start-ups and small and medium-sized businesses that do not have enough resources to launch and maintain their own infrastructure and maintain a large staff. Managed Services allow you to partially replace the capital costs of launching IT systems with monthly operating costs and significantly reduce costs.
Cost Predictability
If your own IT department is working on maintaining the IT infrastructure, administration costs are not always predictable. Peaks in demand around the holidays, after advertising campaigns, sudden outages, and subsequent recovery work all change the load on the IT system and IT department staff.
Paying for Managed Services by subscription makes IT infrastructure maintenance costs predictable: the company knows how much it pays the provider for support, and a certain amount can be budgeted for renewing the service. The price a company pays for ongoing infrastructure support is calculated based on business needs and can be optimized, such as eliminating unnecessary services or replacing them with others.
Hiring competent specialists
Hiring employees with high expertise in IT is difficult and expensive. Sometimes it takes months to find the right specialist. It happens that there are no experts in new technologies in the open HR market.
And if you are looking for a profitable offer for increasing staff, feel free to use the services of the Alcor company. They have specialists with experience in all relevant IT fields of software and web development. Do not hesitate to contact us for advice and to discuss the details of your project.
