5 Benefits of Offshoring, Nearshoring & Outsourcing for EU businesses

IT outsourcing is the best way to gain instant access to highly skilled software delivery talents, cutting costs and shortening the time-to-market for new products and features. Lots of EU businesses opt for outsourcing their IT operations, customer support or software development, as it allows them to concentrate on growing and improving mission-critical business processes.

However, after GDPR has been enacted in the EU, the main issue is finding an IT services company that is GDPR-compliant and will securely store and process the necessary customer data. This can be done in a few ways: offshoring, nearshoring and outsourcing. We will explain why offshoring is actually the best variant and list 5 benefits of IT outsourcing for European and US businesses.

What are outsourcing, offshoring and nearshoring?

Outsourcing, in general, is the process of delegating certain workloads to a separate team, usually outside the main company staff. This is done for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, yet the key idea remains the same — the businesses have to be efficient in order to be competitive, and delegating certain tasks to a third-party company helps avoid the hurdles of forming and successfully maintaining corresponding departments in-house.

Offshoring is an outsourcing model, where the projects are delivered by dedicated teams located in a foreign country. Such a country can be located quite close or quite far from your location, but the timezone differences usually allow the daily tasks to be done overnight.

Nearshoring is an outsourcing model, where the projects are delivered by dedicated teams located in the same or neighboring country. This means the timezones mostly overlap, which simplifies the collaboration between geographically remote teams.

The tasks most often outsourced in modern business are as follows:

• software delivery,
• IT infrastructure management,
• server administration,
• customer support,
• marketing and design,
• corporate training, etc.

Forming all these teams in-house can be a real challenge, as top-notch IT specialists are usually employed by industry leaders and the project budgets are usually limited, so you might face the need to hire a sub-par specialist to get the job done. Besides, most of such projects are relatively short-term, meaning the teams you employ will have to be reduced in size or disbanded entirely in the future. This makes the investment of time and money into hiring and training them essentially wasted, once the talents leave your team, not to mention hard feelings related to firing the staff, no matter how needed the process is.

IT outsourcing benefits

Thus said, IT outsourcing solves the challenges listed above. Offshoring and nearshoring companies that offer dedicated teams for accomplishing such tasks offer a perfect solution with multiple benefits for your business. We list 5 of such benefits below.

1. Cost reduction. This is the primary and most compelling reason for IT outsourcing. From lower wages to shorter project onboarding — working with an offshoring company ensures less money is needed to accomplish the project goals.
2. Shorter time-to-market. Hiring highly experienced professionals who have lots of similar projects under their belt means gaining access to polished workflows and readily available solutions, which will help deliver the project faster.
3. Instant access to a pool of talents. For the reasons described above, finding a good team employed at an IT outsourcing company is much more likely than finding a bunch of unemployed talents and forming an in-house team with them.
4. Project continuity. When a professional leaves your team, the tasks they performed are put on hold until you can find a replacement. If a professional leaves the nearshoring company, they usually have a replacement at hand.
5. Developer documentation. All the work done on your project must be documented to ease the onboarding of new team members in the future. This ensures the entirety of expertise involved in product development is easily available if need be.

Thus said, working with an IT outsourcing company ensures you hire a ready team of professionals, who begin working on your project at once, deliver it on time and provide ample documentation to help their successors. Besides, they can offboard and onboard back later without any hard feelings, should you need to adjust or improve the product.

Conclusions on business benefits of IT outsourcing for EU and US companies

We briefly described the main types of IT outsourcing and the most notable benefits of this approach. But how to find a reliable offshoring company? The best approach is to find a trustworthy IT services provider that is top-rated by various business rating agencies and has the appropriate skill set for your project. Then request the references to their previously completed projects and satisfied customers. A reliable nearshoring provider will gladly share such information and personal references are much more reliable than any promises and statements.