However, an accurate (or at least as accurate as is reasonably possible) assessment of all of the costs that are embedded in outsourced networks leads me to make a very strong recommendation towards an in-house it department (Banks & Card, 2008, p.49).
This shift would substantially increase the reliability of the network along with being far more flexible and (related to the former) far more scalable. Thus the system could grow to meet the company's needs in sync with those needs, neither falling behind nor wasting money by buying new hardware and software in advance of need. An important advantage of waiting of this last is that software and hardware purchased just at the time of need will be the most recently updated and therefore will provide benefits for longer. Adding technical capacity to a network at the moment when it is needed increases both the reliability and the accuracy of a network, thus providing a remedy for two of the most serious problems that the company had been experiencing with the current network provider (Resilience, n.d.).
One of the obvious drawbacks of using an outsourced network provider is that the provider will use hardware and software (as well as making staffing decisions) that are geared toward satisfying the provider's largest customers. This has been, as noted, one of the primary problems that Metric Machine...
An in-house staff would not do this; moreover, employees of the company would be directly responsible to the corporate management, which would make them much more receptive to requests and dicta for work.
Another very important advantage of moving to in-house it is that it will substantially increase the security of the network. There is, of course, no completely secure network (if for no other reason than the ever-so-common practice of writing passwords on post-its and then sticking these to the screen). However, in general the fewer number of people who know a password, the more secure the system is. Given that the networking needs of the company, while growing, remain relatively simple, the size of the it staff can be quite small, thereby substantially reducing potential security problems.
References
Banks, M. & Card, O.S. (2008). On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders. New York: Apress.
Christian, G.C. (2011). It Support: Outsourcing vs. In House it Department. Retrieved from http://www.gguild.com/blog/it-support-outsourcing-vs.-in-house-it-department/
Resilience. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://wiki.ittc.ku.edu/resilinets_wiki/index.php/Definitions
