Are you considering bringing in IT network consultants to work on a project for your business. We understand if the decision is a tricky one; there are a lot of pros and cons to using IT network consultants instead of growing your own IT team. When you use IT network consultants, you have a higher risk of losing the investment you put towards on-boarding and training, since the IT network consultants actually doing the work don’t work for you. Perhaps you’re concerned that using outsourced IT network consultants will take a hit to your internal team’s morale. Perhaps you’re worried that you’ll get trapped using an IT consulting company that isn’t in the best interest of your company, because if you change providers (or move in-house) you’ll lose the knowledge.


However, for every concern that you might have, there just as many benefits to using it support companies. In this article we’ll focus on some of the benefits to outsourcing your IT networking projects that you might not have considered.

Four Benefits of Bringing in IT Networking Consultants

1. Using consultants rather than employees for IT projects costs less.
   
   You might be concerned that hour for hour, the cost of bringing in an IT consultant is more than that of paying an employee. However, when you hire an employee, you are agreeing to pay for far more than just their hourly rate. You’re paying for an average of 30% above the salary for each employee in benefits such as health insurance, vacation pay, and 401k contributions. You have to pay for someone to manage your employees. You have to pay for ongoing training, so that your employees’ subject knowledge remains relevant in the ever-changing tech industry. There is a time that hiring a full-time IT networking employee makes sense, but there are many instances where you can save yourself an arm and a leg by outsourcing.




2. Using IT consultants lets you take advantage of the services you need, without having to buy the whole cow.
   
   Having a comprehensive IT department involves numerous sub-specialties. If you grow your own IT team in-house, you’ll need a networking team. You’ll need an IT security team. You’ll need a database team. You’ll need programmers. Even if you your IT team is 100 men-strong, you still won’t cover every IT specialty you might need. And, if you refer back to our first point, each warm body you bring on full-time costs you big bucks.
   
   
   Meanwhile, when you outsource, you can piecemeal all of the IT functions you need without having to pay for the entire employee. Maybe you need a few hours of IT security consulting, and a few hours for telephony manpower, and a couple hours of database management. You can get the work you need without having to hire a new employee for each service. And when you need a random one-off specialty, one time, you probably have it at your fingertips.




3. Your IT consultants can help you get more strategically focused.
   
   When your in-house team is spending all of their time doing maintenance tasks like running updates and planned outages, they aren’t available to work on growth and strategic projects, like implementing processes that lead to less planned outages and updates. Some businesses find it successful to use IT consultants to take over the mundane maintenance tasks, so that their in-house team is available to focus on creating a more future-focused and efficient operation.




4. Using IT consultants helps you stay hip with what’s hip.
   
   Technology is a constantly changing industry. If you hired your IT team in 1993 and assumed that since it was working then, it still works now, you are definitely missing huge areas for efficiency improvement. On the other hand, it’s not practical to constantly pour money into keeping your IT team on the bleeding edge of technology. It’s very difficult to know what you need to know without wasting your time on the noise that doesn’t benefit your business.
   
   However, IT consultants make it their business to know what’s on the horizon in the IT business. When you use an IT consultant, they’ll identify the technology advancements that could really benefit you, without you having to waste the resources to get on-board with technology that won’t help you.

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