18^th May 2023

Concern #11: Poor Infrastructure

Sometimes, companies are reluctant to use outsourcing, fearing a weak IT infrastructure on the supplier’s side. They fear ongoing technical problems in their communications, losing the produced source code or documentation, and disruptions in the work of the remote team.

This concern is based on the fact that most outsourcing providers reside in developing countries with lower standards of infrastructure. Suppliers may experience power outages, have low-speed Internet connection, lack access to the high-quality equipment and services needed to create advanced infrastructure. Alternatively, suppliers can intentionally minimize investment in IT infrastructure, considering it low priority.

Today, these valid concerns are becoming ever less relevant as cloud services grow in popularity. A business no longer needs a heavy server infrastructure on its premises, as most of its required services can now be moved to the cloud. Software outsourcing providers can use clouds to store project sources and documentation, test applications, show demos to the client, and perform various management tasks. They can also develop software in the cloud by using cloud-based development workspace. Today, the on-premises IT infrastructure can be quite slim without compromising performance, reliability, and security.

Another issue is the infrastructure aspect of work from home, which became very popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains a common practice. Domestic IT infrastructure is not always highly reliable and properly protected, and, in many cases, it doesn’t have any backups and monitoring. It could be prohibitively expensive to make home infrastructure as robust as a corporate one. If the outsourcing supplier’s employees work at home, this introduces additional risks and magnifies the concern in point.

In general, while the poor infrastructure concern can still be valid to a certain extent, it should not hinder using outsourcing, as the risks can be mitigated or even made non-existent by using proper technical and organizational measures. A professional and mature provider of outsourcing services likely has a reliable and quality IT infrastructure. Sometimes, the provider’s infrastructure is even more advanced than that of the client.

At Solead, we have applied a number of practices to assure the proper quality and reliability of our IT infrastructure. In particular, we:

• Host our delivery center in a modern class A office building with advanced power supply, HVAC, and fire protection systems
• Have access to multiple Internet providers with ground and satellite Internet connection
• Use enterprise-grade Ubiquity network and security equipment protected by APC UPS
• Use Google, Microsoft, and Atlassian cloud services for our in-company business activities
• Allow partial work from home, but conduct all important client communication, demos, and deliveries from the office

Our last post in this series of publications will be about governmental regulations in the IT industry.