Information technology (IT) departments face many challenges while working on two solutions: Staff Augmentation and Managed Services. Although both are reliable solutions, making a choice between them to achieve your goals could be a difficult task if you don’t already understand how they work and suit different project requirements. Read further to have a better understanding of which one to choose to fulfill your vision and mission.

Staff Augmentation

Many IT departments prefer to have their own in-house teams for development projects. But, often arises a situation when the in-house team couldn’t fill a gap because of lacking some additional skills that are required to complete a project. This is where staff augmentation comes to their rescue. In staff augmentation approach, an organization ropes in qualified workers from outside to work with its in-house team to cover skills gaps for a specific project. Staff augmentation helps meet deadlines without compromising on the overall quality of the project. Using extra resources via staff augmentation also saves significant costs that are associated with hiring internally.

Firms that provide staff augmentation services helps businesses assess their needs and hire as many employees as required. And, since their is no full-time employee commitment with staff augmentation approach, employers can easily increase or decrease the number of employees as and when changes occur in requirements. With staff augmentation, you can zero-in on identified area to solve a problem. Let’s have a look at all the advantages of staff augmentation.

Advantages of Staff Augmentation

Cost Effective

Staff augmentation saves a lot of money that is spent on hiring, training, providing health insurances, retirement plans, taxes, and many more. You easily get access to employees with specific skills that your in-house team members lack, that too without having to spend money on recruiting and offering employee benefits. You only pay for the number of hours you extra resources have worked for. Therefore, you save a lot of money that is otherwise paid as full-time salaries year-around.

Staff augmentation service providers have a database of skilled and certified candidates to meet your specific project requirements. So, you also don’t need to spend money on training them. Only training that is required is to acquaint them with company domain and processes, so that they acclimatize easily.

Staff augmentation also helps cut costs of advertisements, job postings and administration to hire candidates with specific skill-set.

Better Control

Staff augmentation allows you to have a better control of your project all the time. You always stay in-sync with your resources and closely monitor their activities. If you come across any efficiency related issue, you can take effective measures before it’s too late, therefore you never lose on productivity. Besides, you can delegate what you feel is important to a resource you know is best suited for.

Staff augmentation also allows you to make better use of your existing resources. When an organization outsources a project, the company it has outsourced the project to has complete control over how the resources will be used. The company may or may not use all the resources for timely completion of the project. Staff augmentation, on the other hand, enables to keep a proper check on the activities of every employee and make the best use of them.

Scalability

That you may get a project of large size, scalability comes as a handy feature of staff augmentation. That ability to not say no just because of large size of a project always proves fruitful for your business. Also, being able to deliver diverse services enhances your brand value, and delivering quality solutions raises the bars of client satisfaction.

Flexibility

Staff augmentation approach also offers flexibility as it doesn’t let seasonal factors or employees leaving your firm to have an adverse impact on your business. Online retailers especially feel the need to cope with seasonal fluctuations as many employees go on vacation. By going for staff augmentation, they can always keep the number of IT staff in control and effectively deal with staff shortages and unexpected attrition.

Offers a New Perspective

With staff augmentation, you get a fresh perspective about how things are going. It’s very unlikely for a short term employee to participate in office politics and have a negative impact on efficiency. Instead, the efficiency and discipline the staff augmentation employee brings to your workplace could encourage your in-house staff to improve their performance too. The temporary employee also helps you understand the project in a better way by providing you an objective outlook from a new perspective.

Staff augmentation brings a lot of advantages to a business, but it’s not the only way to get your projects done. Another option that is also used by many organizations to fulfill their project needs is Managed Services.

Managed Services

Managed services means outsourcing IT operations to a service provider. A managed service provider (MSP) takes all the responsibility of resource allocation, management, monitoring and problem resolution. As a result, an organization that adopts managed services gets to focus on more important aspects of its business. Let’s gain an insight into all the advantages managed services has to offer.

Top Advantages of Managed Services

Reduces Costs related to Infrastructure and Complex IT Solutions

Since managed services approach does not require you to hire resources internally, you free yourself from the need of setting infrastructure for them, which reduces business cost. We all know that hardware and software components of IT systems keep evolving from time to time. As a result, businesses with limited budget may find it difficult to keep pace with them. However, going for managed services allows them to reap the benefits of latest IT solutions at a reduced cost and offer their clients top-notch services.

Control over Service Levels and Performance

Since both the client and managed service provider agree on a service level agreement (SLA), roles of both the parties are clearly defined. SLA clearly describes what services a managed service provider will provide and what the minimum response time, liability protection, payment structure and performance standards would be. Therefore, a client gets a better control over service levels and performance by paying a fixed amount every month.

MSPs also offers 24*7 support at no additional cost. Having access to one single point of contact for IT support also saves time, money and resources.

Allows to Focus on Core Competencies and Business Goals

MSPs have highly skilled technical resources to proactively maintain IT environment and infrastructure of clients. Therefore, it becomes possible for internal team to have improved focus on core business functions. Be it hardware, on-site data center, application monitoring, MSPs keep everything covered. An MSP acts as an extra arm to your internal teams, and takes the burden of devising IT strategies and solutions to meet your unique business and technical requirements.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery

MSPs also provide backup and disaster recovery solutions, so that you never lose your important business information. Most MSPs have specially designed networks and data centers to ensure reliable backups and faster recovery, both locally and from the cloud. IT managed services also provides protection from hackers, malware and downtime. MSPs have cutting-edge resources and information to quickly identify security issues and take preventative measures to mitigate risks before it’s too late.

Enhances Global Expansion and Growth

Many MSPs are capable of deploying infrastructure and other services globally as they have global facilities. As a result, an organization can save a lot of money that is required to hire additional resources in order to support expansion. If you choose an MSP with a presence in a region where your business is likely to grow, you will easily get support for IT infrastructure, applications and operations. MSPs also offer scalable services and only charge you for the level of support provided at a given time.

Staff augmentation and managed services have their own advantages, but one needs to assess their needs, budget and other requirements before choosing between them to brace their business. Both the IT solutions are highly reliable and helps IT departments not just save huge business costs, but benefit from latest advancements and technologies as well.

What do you think about the future of staff augmentation and managed services? Which one suits your business requirements the most? As always, your views are vital for us, please get in touch with Evon Technologies, one of the best software development companies in India and share them in the comment box below.