Bluetris

IT Outsourcing: What is it and How does it work?

IT outsourcing

IT outsourcing is a rapidly expanding sector of the economy and a useful tool for many businesses. The advantages of outsourcing are used by both established corporations and new ventures. You can reduce expenses or gain a stronger competitive advantage with this strategy.

This article aims to introduce IT outsourcing advantages, the most efficient models, and types – an original proposal to help your company achieve the results expected in software projects.

What is IT Outsourcing?

IT Outsourcing means that a company moves a part of software development outside of its internal organization to control all processes and reduce costs. You basically, hand over task implementation to your partner and keep an eye on things.

IT outsourcing can be implemented both in and outside the country. There are three main types of IT outsourcing which refer to where the service is being provided.

 

Types of IT Outsourcing

Types of IT Outsourcing

The three main types of IT outsourcing are:

  1. Onshore
  2. Nearshore
  3. Offshore

Onshore: Onshore it is the process of hiring professionals, located nearby or within the same city. This helps in keeping everything under control by optimizing costs.

Nearshore: It is outsourcing to adjacent nations that share the same time zone. You can communicate with developers more easily if you select this option, but it’s not always profitable.

Offshore: It is outsourcing to another country. This type allows you to save up the most.

However, according to Clutch in 2023, 83% of small businesses will continue to spend on outsourced business services which increase their spending. Additionally, they emphasize that the following are the primary goals of IT outsourcing:

  • Reduce Cost
  • Bring industry experience to the in-house team

IT outsourcing can be an effective way for business owners, particularly startup founders, to grow their company more quickly and save more money than they could with a small in-house team. Large corporations such as Google, Apple, and Facebook also contract out portions of their work to experts in different fields.

Read More: What is Integration Testing

IT Outsourcing Model

Before signing a contract with an Information technology outsourcing company, first choose the corporation model. While some forms of IT outsourcing are limited to a certain geographic area, the outsourcing business model specifies the nature of the collaboration and its ultimate objectives. These three most popular IT outsourcing models include a pros and cons list.

Project-Based Model

How it Works: The portion of the work that has already been planned and defined is implemented by a team that the client hires. The outsourced team’s project manager is solely accountable for the project’s performance and quality.

When to Use: The project-based model of IT outsourcing is appropriate for simple projects with well-established and dependable functionality.

Pros and Cons of Project Based Model

Pros: 

  • Precise deadlines and results;
  • Save time for your in-house team;
  • Get things done quickly;
  • Quick hiring procedure;
  • No Micromanagement;
  • Full responsibility lies on one shoulder;

Cons: 

  • Less Control over the project
  • Lack of flexibility
  • The results may be good and well-planned but don’t meet the industry standards.

Dedicated Team Model

How it Works: A team that the client hires will design a project for them, and they will only work on that project. A dedicated IT outsourcing team is more invested in your project than is the case with the project-based model. Under this model, your technical and product advisors are an external team. Thus, it can provide concepts and recommend different approaches.

When to Use: The dedicated team IT outsourcing model works well for complicated long-term projects with potential for growth, early-stage startups with room to grow, and projects with a lot of ambiguous requirements. The committed team is the best choice if you want to test the market, find product-market fit, or validate your idea.

We at Bluetris focus on a dedicated team model. Our product management team expanded the audience, determined product-market fit, and validated the original concept. Utilizing an iterative process, the design team enhanced the solution’s usability. Overall, we were successful in releasing the most advanced UI solutions in the current product.

Pros and Cons of Dedicated Development Team Model

Pros: 

  • More Control over the development Process
  • Working with different professionals with greater expertise in different industries.
  • More Flexibility
  • No Micromanagement
  • More time with the in-house team to work on the big picture.

Cons:

  • Long Hiring Process
  • More responsibilities on project

Outstaff Model

How it Works: This kind of IT outsourcing is used when you hire specialized experts rather than a full-fledged development team. You are free to hire outstaff workers to complete any additional work that may be needed for the project if it calls for finding a few more professionals.

The demand for this kind of cooperative IT outsourcing has been increasing over time, and by 2027, it is expected that global IT service revenue will reach $1,570 billion. Web development is the most in-demand IT skill in 2023, followed by database software developers and DevOps specialists.

When to Use: The outstaff IT outsourcing model works best for short-term projects or companies that don’t have specialized knowledge and need more workers to grow quickly.

As an outsourcing and outstaffing firm, Bluetris offers services like staff augmentation. Here are two situations where working with us will maximize your benefits:

  • When you lack in-house resources and need extra hands to develop a product – choose IT outstaffing.
  • When you lack product expertise and need a product development team (product managers, designers, developers, QAs) to build your product – choose IT outsourcing.

Over the years we’ve helped 100+ companies to turn their ideas into valuable marketable products. Our team comprises experts from various fields, and we use the Agile development methodology to stay adaptable and productive while creating, evaluating, and enhancing applications.

Pros and Cons of Outstaff Model

Pros: 

  • No need to hire whole team
  • Fill the gaps in your project fast
  • Flexibility to hire as many as professionals you need

Cons:

  • Long search and recruiting processes
  • More time on the onboarding

Read More:  What is Software Testing?

Why Should You Use IT Outsourcing?

Now that you are familiar with the definition, models, and types of IT outsourcing, it’s time to decide whether outsourcing is actually necessary and why it is necessary. Let’s discuss a few scenarios that illustrate when outsourcing IT might be the best option.

You are a Domain Expert with a idea

Outsourcing IT is the best option if you’re a real-world problem solver and an industry expert. Here, getting the solution into the market and testing it quickly are your primary objectives. Your idea will be validated, an MVP will be created to test the hypothesis, and your product will be modified to better meet the needs of the market with the assistance of an external team. It enables you to accomplish the goal and saves money and time.

You Have An Early-Stage Startup

Frequently, fledgling startups burn through funding before they have a strong team and a product that is ready for release. The Failory discovered that the third reason for startup failure is financial difficulties. Therefore, while your company is dependent on the funds of investors, it makes more financial sense to cut expenses by employing an external team of experts. You can hire a full-cycle studio to develop your product, covering all the gaps and making it a reality.

You need a Technical Expert

It makes more sense to find an experienced partner even if you already have a working solution, but it still needs some technical improvements (new language, frameworks for backend components, enterprise app integrations, UX&UI design). IT outsourcing can handle a wide range of tasks, and it again saves you time compared to hiring the right people.

Read More: DevOps Automation, What is DevOps and How it helps in automate software delivery process.

How Much Does IT Outsourcing Cost?

Two important variables that might impact the range of IT outsourcing costs are the size of the team and the hourly rates of the developers.

It’s critical to understand the differences between IT outstaffing and outsourcing. While outstaffing enables you to bring on remote developers as members of your own team, IT outsourcing entails giving the project over to an outside organization

For IT outsourcing, the cost can range from $50,000 to $250,000. However, in the case of IT outstaffing, where you hire individual developers, the prices can vary significantly. On average, for a single developer, the price can range from $25 to $100 per hour, depending on their experience and location..

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to dispel the myth that information technology outsourcing is low-profile deliverables and last-resort decisions. We discovered that there are many advantages to outsourcing for even large tech companies. In order to save time and money, early-stage startups can also benefit greatly from IT outsourcing.

Bluetris Technologies is a service-oriented business that specializes in the IT outstaffing model of Dedicated teams. We offer a full-cycle product development team to our clients. This group of experts will devote themselves entirely to your project, starting from the ideation phase and ending with the product launch.

DevOps Automation: Benefits and Uses

DevOps Automation

DevOps is the fusion of IT operations and software development. DevOps techniques and tools are intended to expedite a product’s development and promote efficiency throughout its lifecycle. Development and deployment processes are slowed down by repetitive and monotonous tasks, which are managed and automated by DevOps. DevOps automation accelerates software development, testing, deployment, and monitoring tasks to produce more rapid iteration cycles and tighter feedback loops. Automating repetitive manual tasks lowers their cost and burden. In this article, you’ll learn What is DevOps Automation, the Benefits of DevOps Automation, its Real Use Case, and what DevOps process can be automated.

 

 
Table of Content

What is DevOps Automation?

DevOps Automation is a set of tools and technologies that carry out repetitive, standard tasks that engineers would typically complete by hand. As software development and operations teams work together to continuously improve how they design, build, test, deploy, release, and monitor software applications, task automation across the SDLC facilitates this collaboration. Automating repetitive manual tasks and fostering greater cross-team collaboration are the two main objectives of automating DevOps.

By eliminating bottlenecks and human error, DevOps automation tools accelerate delivery cycles by producing fewer and shorter feedback loops. From the final release and delivery of an application or service upgrade to the most recent code committed to a repository, there is an increase in efficiency.

The use of Kubernetes, containers, and microservices infrastructure allows for the continued evolution and optimization of this incremental software development and continuous deployment methodology.

What DevOps Processes can be Automated?

The implementation of an automated DevOps and IT framework solution can be relatively easy or quite difficult, depending on the current state of an organization’s unique cloud adoption journey, desired outcomes, and existing business goals.

Automating the following DevOps processes is a smart idea, regardless of whether the computing environment is housed in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, a public cloud computing service, or on-premises:

Automated CI/CD:  For agile DevOps teams, these pipelines represent best practices. To produce secure code and satisfy important business requirements, CI/CD must be automated. When appropriate, this also applies to continuous deployment, in which each approved change is automatically pushed to production.

Automated Testing: The goal of automated end-to-end testing is to find mistakes, flaws, and problems as early in the CI/CD pipeline as possible. This procedure aids in ensuring that end users receive regular, high-quality software updates.

Automated Application Monitoring: Automated application and log monitoring tracks issues reported through DEM management or logs, providing deep insights into application performance and enabling fast mean time between failures. The ultimate aim is to provide continuous 24/7 service from any location and on any device.

Automated Network Provisioning:  This uses preset processes to provide computing capacity on demand without requiring human intervention. It can also facilitate the deployment of applications in software containers like Kubernetes, depending on the IT solution.

Benefits of Automation in DevOps

The use of Automation in DevOps in software development has many advantages. Among these advantages are:

Enhanced Speed: Automation makes software development and deployment processes faster and more effective, which cuts down on the time it takes to release updates and new features.

Increased Quality: Teams can produce software that is more dependable and stable by automating testing, software deployment, and monitoring procedures. This helps to cut down on errors and inconsistencies.

Improved Cooperation: Automation fosters a closer working relationship between the operations and development teams, facilitating improved coordination and communication.

Increased Productivity: Automation frees up teams to concentrate on more complex jobs that call for human involvement by doing repetitive, manual tasks.

Cost Savings: Automation minimizes downtime and eliminates the need for manual labour, which over time saves a lot of money.

Faster Time-to-Market: Teams can launch new features and products more quickly if they can expedite the development and deployment processes. This gives companies a competitive advantage in their sector.

Increased Customer Satisfaction: More prompt and dependable delivery of high-quality software results in happier customers.

Software development and operations can gain a great deal from Automating DevOps, including faster time to market, better customer satisfaction, increased speed, better quality, improved collaboration, and cost optimization.

What are the best practices of DevOps Automation?

Keep Engineers in the Loop

The majority of the time, a DevOps pipeline cannot be fully automated. In DevOps, automation does not eliminate the role of engineers. When something goes wrong or needs to be updated, human oversight and intervention are still necessary in even the most automated DevOps processes.

However, teams should aim to automate as much as they can because it reduces the need for humans to handle routine, basic tasks related to DevOps.

Unify the DevOps Toolchain

Software delivery becomes more complex and visibility is hampered by pipeline diversity and toolchain fragmentation. The software delivery pipeline’s performance cannot be easily measured and optimised in real-time centrally due to the high fragmentation amongst different tools and teams. Although each tool offers context regarding its performance, data sharing is challenging, making it challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your organisation is run.

Teams may evaluate, benchmark, and continuously enhance their software development and delivery performance in real-time with Sumo Logic’s help by streamlining the visibility of the software development pipeline. We bring software development pipelines into the realm of observability.

By automatically correlating data across their CI/CD pipelines, we enable development organizations to continuously benchmark and optimize their software delivery performance. Leading cloud development tools such as AWS, Azure, GCP & Jira, GitHub, Bitbucket Jenkins, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and many more are integrated with our solution.

Conclusion

DevOps automation can help and make your life a lot easier. By automating time-consuming development lifecycle tasks, CI/CD pipelines help you cut down on the expenses, complexity, and labor-intensive nature of repetitive manual tasks. Pipelines can also be used to provide an additional layer of quality assurance and control to the deployment process and post-deployment monitoring, which will give you the assurance you need to proceed swiftly and provide value to your clients. However to get started automating your development workflows with best-in-class CI/CD, contact Bluetris Technologies for the pipeline to get run.

Frequently Asked Question

Which Automation Tool is used in DevOps?

A group of DevOps automation tools called Docker builds containerised environments for apps, increasing their portability, security, and minimizing conflicts during testing. Docker makes it possible for DevOps to develop and execute applications rapidly.

Which language is best for automation DevOps?

Python is frequently regarded as being superior for DevOps because of its ease of use, adaptability, and rich library support, which make it perfect for scripting and automation jobs. It is extensively utilised for orchestration and configuration management.

What are the Benefits of Automation in DevOps?
Benefits of DevOps

  • Faster, better product delivery.
  • Faster issue resolution and reduced complexity.
  • Greater scalability and availability.
  • More stable operating environments.
  • Better resource utilization.
  • Greater automation.
  • Greater visibility into system outcomes.
  • Greater innovation.
  • What is an example of automation in DevOps?

    Developers use continuous integration (CI) to continuously merge their changes back into the main branch. Every change is automatically built and tested by the CI/CD server. For instance, developers can automate different phases of their build pipeline using Jenkins, a well-known open source automation server.

    Can You Automate DevOps?

    DevOps automation accelerates software development, testing, deployment, and monitoring tasks to produce more rapid iteration cycles and tighter feedback loops. Automating repetitive manual tasks lowers their cost and burden.

    What is DevOps? The Ultimate Guide

    What is DevOps

    DevOps is a collaborative effort aimed at conceiving, constructing, and delivering secure software with utmost efficiency. By incorporating practices that emphasize automation, collaboration, prompt feedback, and continual improvement, DevOps facilitates the acceleration of software delivery by harmonizing the efforts of development and operations teams. 

    Streaming in an Agile principle, the DevOps process builds upon a cross-functional approach to expedite the building and deployment of applications more iteratively. Opting for a DevOps development approach signifies a commitment to enhancing the flow and value delivery of your application, fostering a collaborative environment throughout the entire development cycle. 

    It signifies a shift in the IT culture, building upon Agile, lean practices, and systems theory, with a focus on incremental development and swift software delivery. Success in DevOps hinges on cultivating a culture of accountability, enhanced collaboration, empathy, and shared responsibility for achieving business objectives.

    What is DevOps?

    “DevOps is a combination of software development (dev) and operations (ops). It is defined as a software engineering methodology that aims to integrate the work of development teams and operations teams by facilitating a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.”

    Core Principles of DevOps

    The DevOps methodology is built upon four core principles that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of application development and deployment. These principles, outlined below, encapsulate the most valuable aspects of contemporary software development.

    • Automation of the Software Development Lifecycle: Streamline the software delivery process by automating tasks such as testing, builds, releases, and the provisioning of development environments. This reduces slowdowns and minimizes the introduction of human error.
     
    • Collaboration and Communication: A proficient DevOps team incorporates automation, but an exceptional one also prioritizes effective collaboration and communication among team members.
     
    • Continuous Improvement and Waste Minimization: High-performing DevOps teams are constantly seeking ways to enhance efficiency, from automating repetitive tasks to analyzing performance metrics to reduce release times and mean-time-to-recovery.
     
    • Hyperfocus on User Needs with Short Feedback Loops: Through automation, improved collaboration, and continuous improvement, DevOps teams can concentrate on understanding and fulfilling the real needs of users, establishing short feedback loops for rapid adjustments.

    By embracing these principles, organizations can elevate code quality, accelerate time to market, and enhance overall application planning.

    The Four Phases of DevOps

    As DevOps has evolved, so has its complexity. Two factors drive this complexity:

    • Organizations are moving from monolithic architectures to microservices architectures. As DevOps matures, organizations need more and more DevOps tools per project.
     
    • The result of more projects and more tools per project has been an exponential increase in the number of project-tool integrations. This necessitated a change in the way organizations adopted DevOps tools.

    This evolution took place in the following four phases:

    Phase 1: Bring Your DevOps 

    In the Bring Your Own DevOps phase, each team selected its tools. This approach caused problems when teams attempted to work together because they were not familiar with the tools of other teams.

    Phase 2: Best-in-class DevOps 

    To address the challenges of using disparate tools, organizations moved to the second phase, Best-in-class DevOps. In this phase, organizations standardized on the same set of tools, with one preferred tool for each stage of the DevOps lifecycle. It helped teams collaborate, but the problem then became moving software changes through the tools for each stage.

    Phase 3: Do-it-yourself DevOps 

    To remedy this problem, organizations adopted do-it-yourself (DIY) DevOps, building on top of and between their tools. They performed a lot of custom work to integrate their DevOps point solutions. However, since these tools were developed independently without integration in mind, they never fit quite right. For many organizations, maintaining DIY DevOps was a significant effort and resulted in higher costs, with engineers maintaining tooling integration rather than working on their core software product.

    Phase 4: DevOps Platform 

    A single-application platform approach improves the team experience and business efficiency. A DevOps platform replaces DIY DevOps, allowing visibility throughout and control over all stages of the DevOps lifecycle. By empowering all teams – Development, Operations, IT, Security, and Business – to collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software across an end-to-end unified system, a DevOps platform represents a fundamental step-change in realizing the full potential of DevOps.

    DevOps platform is a single application powered by a cohesive user interface, agnostic of self-managed or SaaS deployment. It is built on a single codebase with a unified data store that allows organizations to resolve the inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of an unreliable DIY toolchain.

    What are the Benefits of DevOps Culture?

    Speed: Operate at high speed to drive innovation for customers, adapt to dynamic markets, and enhance efficiency in achieving business outcomes. DevOps empowers your development and operations teams to attain these goals. For instance, the implementation of microservices and continuous delivery allows teams to take ownership of services and expedite the release of updates.

    Rapid Delivery: Elevate the frequency and speed of releases to accelerate innovation and product improvement. The ability to release new features and address issues rapidly enables a prompt response to customer needs, fostering a competitive advantage. Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery automate the software release process from build to deployment.

    Reliability: Assure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes to deliver at a rapid pace while ensuring a positive user experience. Continuous integration and continuous delivery practices verify the functionality and safety of each change. Real-time monitoring and logging practices keep you informed of performance metrics.

    Scalability: Effectively operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency aid in efficiently handling complex or evolving systems with reduced risk. Infrastructure as code, for instance, enables the management of development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and efficient manner.

    Enhanced Collaboration: Cultivate more efficient teams within the DevOps cultural model, emphasizing values like ownership and accountability. Close collaboration between developers and operations teams, shared responsibilities, and streamlined workflows reduce inefficiencies and save time, such as minimizing handover periods between development and operations and writing code that considers its operational environment.

    Security: Maintain a balance between speed and control while preserving compliance. Adopting a DevOps model doesn’t mean compromising on security; automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques can be utilized. Infrastructure as code and policy as code enables the definition and tracking of compliance at scale.

    How DevOps can Benefit from AI/ML?

    AI and machine learning (ML) are evolving in their applications within DevOps, offering organizations immediate benefits, particularly in leveraging the technology to interpret test data.

    These advanced technologies excel in identifying patterns, pinpointing coding issues that lead to bugs, and notifying DevOps teams for further investigation.

    Similarly, DevOps teams can harness the power of AI and ML to analyze security data sourced from logs and various tools, effectively identifying breaches and attacks. Upon detection, AI and ML can initiate automated mitigation strategies and issue alerts.

    Furthermore, AI and ML contribute to time savings for developers and operations professionals by learning and adapting to their preferred working methods. They offer suggestions within workflows and automatically set up preferred infrastructure configurations.

    How DevOps Cycle Work?

    The DevOps lifecycle spans the entire software development process, encompassing planning, creation, verification, packaging, security, release, configuration, monitoring, and governance. Here’s a breakdown of each stage:

    Plan: Organize tasks, prioritize them, and monitor progress.

    Create: Collaboratively write, design, develop, and securely manage code and project data.

    Verify: Ensure code correctness and adherence to quality standards, ideally through automated testing.

    Package: Package applications and manage dependencies, including container management and artifact building.

    Secure: Detects vulnerabilities using static and dynamic tests, fuzz testing, and dependency scanning.

    Release: Deploy the software to end users.

    Configure: Manage and configure the infrastructure required to support applications.

    Monitor: Track performance metrics and errors to minimize incident severity and frequency.

    Govern: Oversee security vulnerabilities, policies, and compliance organization-wide.

    This comprehensive DevOps lifecycle ensures a streamlined and efficient software development and delivery process.

    How does DevOps support the cloud-native approach?

    The widespread shift of software development to the cloud comes with numerous benefits, leading to the increasing adoption of cloud-native computing by companies. By constructing, testing, and deploying applications in the cloud, organizations can achieve cost savings through easier resource scalability. This approach supports swift software shipping, aligns with business objectives, and liberates DevOps teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.

    Cloud-native application development fosters enhanced collaboration between developers and operations teams, ultimately resulting in the delivery of superior software at an accelerated pace.

    Conclusion

    The foundation of IT agility and the secret to a successful digital transformation is DevOps. To begin their DevOps journey, organizations must, however, implement organisational, process, and cultural changes.

    The goal of several key DevOps practices, such as automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and observability, is to improve efficiency and streamline the software development process. Software development teams can increase their productivity, quality, and speed by implementing a continuous integration and delivery pipeline and automating repetitive tasks. This is made possible by DevOps.

    DevOps is about culture and teamwork as much as it is about tools and procedures. The goal of DevOps is to improve communication and understanding of needs and goals between development and operations teams by bringing them together to work more closely and productively. In a DevOps culture is accountable for the software’s quality and delivery, and cooperation and communication are highly valued.

    If you want to enhance your software development process, you should give DevOps some thought.

    Feel free to reach out for your DevOps Solutions or optimization of your current DevOps Project. We provide different DevOps Services, Cloud Computing, Automation, Cost Optimization, and Agile Methodology. We’re eager to learn about your project needs and discuss potential collaborations.

    Frequently Asked Question

    The ultimate objectives of a DevOps engineer are to expedite the software development cycle, boost the frequency of software releases, integrate development and operations teams, and enable more dependable releases.

    The goal of the DevOps methodology and culture is to optimise software delivery processes by fostering cooperation and integration between development and operations teams. Although writing code is a crucial part of developing software, DevOps includes a wider range of procedures, resources, and ideas than just coding.

    Coding and scripting are essential skills for automating any kind of DevOps task. You’ll be able to simplify your work and boost productivity and efficiency with these abilities.

    If you’re new to DevOps, start by studying the foundations of cloud computing, operating systems, and programming. Learn about DevOps tools and procedures, create your own projects, participate in open-source initiatives, and look for internships or entry-level jobs in the industry.

    A few of the most widely used DevOps automation tools are Chef, Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack. An infrastructure management tool that assists you in managing your infrastructure as code is called Puppet.