IT outsourcing: how IT services are changing

IT outsourcing has changed a lot in recent years: companies are no longer looking just for someone to fix their computers, but for a partner that takes responsibility for all of their IT, works alongside the in-house team, commits to measurable results and keeps security under control. We wrote the first version of this article in August 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Below you’ll find the trends we saw back then, checked against what has happened since.

If you’re interested in the service itself, read our IT Outsourcing page.

IT outsourcing in 2026 at a glance

• Companies look for long-term partnerships, not just suppliers, preferably with a single point of contact for all of their IT.
• Co-sourcing, where the external team works alongside the in-house IT staff, has become a common model.
• SMEs, including companies with fewer than 10 employees, are outsourcing IT more and more often.
• Backsourcing, meaning bringing IT back in-house, remains an option, but it takes people and investment that few small and medium-sized companies can afford.
• Contracts are tied to measurable results: response times, system availability, monthly reports.
• Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania, has remained an important destination for IT outsourcing.
• Automation, remote monitoring and artificial intelligence have changed the way services are delivered.
• Security and business continuity (NIS2, backup, an incident response plan) are at the heart of every contract.

What do companies ask about IT outsourcing?

In 2021, entrepreneurs and IT leaders were asking:

• What has changed in IT outsourcing with the pandemic?
• Has the market become more unpredictable?
• To what extent have automation and cloud services taken over the industry?
• Is it still wise to outsource IT, or not?
• And, more importantly: are current outsourcing practices good enough, now that the pandemic has affected every aspect of business?

IT outsourcing: tell me more →

These questions had been troubling entrepreneurs for some time, and the pandemic, which had brought everything to a standstill, made them even more pressing. Every IT leader or organization that outsources IT or plans to (whether they hire remote staff, work with dedicated teams or develop products) needs to ask them.

Back then, we looked for answers in market reports. A report by Global Industry Analysts forecast that the IT outsourcing market would pass the $220 billion mark as early as 2020. The forecast reassured us about the market, but it didn’t say what the best outsourcing practices would be after the pandemic.

To the last and simplest question, our answer today is “yes” for most small and medium-sized companies: a managed IT services provider gives you a whole team (user support, network, security, backup) for a fixed monthly cost, usually lower than that of a full in-house IT department. Here’s how IT outsourcing practices have changed and what matters now.

How is IT outsourcing changing? The main trends

1. Partnerships have replaced mere suppliers

Companies have moved toward digital transformation, and IT outsourcing has followed the same path: from the traditional value chain to a network of partners that is more flexible and easier to scale.

Partnership networks are the connections you build to create value for your company or its processes. In IT outsourcing, this means relationships with software development or digital marketing companies, or major contracts with IT service providers, all of which add value to the outsourced services.

There are several types of relationship networks:

• the partner network, where two or more companies come together to share outsourced services and save costs;
• the service provider network, where several IT service providers come together to handle complex requirements;
• a single company working with specialists from several providers, for better results.

In 2021, many companies that had long outsourced accounting, marketing or web development wanted to try the multi-vendor approach for IT as well: IT architecture, cloud services, development and security from different companies, to get the best out of each.

The price of this approach is coordination: when a problem comes up, the providers can pass the buck to one another. That’s why more and more small and medium-sized companies prefer a single point of contact for all of their IT, who also coordinates the other providers when needed. We explained this model in our article on IT SPOC services and what they mean.

2. Co-sourcing: the external team works alongside in-house IT

IT outsourcing is a buyer-centric market. The buyer (the company requesting IT outsourcing services) describes its requirements in a request for proposal. The seller (the outsourcing company) decides it can meet those requirements and submits a proposal. Price, duration, team, technology and skills are proposed according to the buyer’s requirements.

As early as 2021, however, it was clear that the focus was shifting from simply cutting costs to reducing the risks that come with outsourcing. This gave rise to an approach that aims to create value for both parties, the provider and the client: co-sourcing.

What is co-sourcing?

It’s an approach in which a company works with an external team that acts as its own in-house team. The in-house and external teams work together, side by side, to create value: they share the risks, face problems together and find quick solutions.

By motivating both sides, co-sourcing improves the results of outsourcing. Even during a crisis or when the workload suddenly grows, work isn’t held back, because both teams focus on the outcome of the collaboration, not just on ticking off the tasks in the contract.

Co-sourcing has spread especially among companies that already have an IT person or team. The provider takes over monitoring, security, backup and user support, while the in-house team handles the company’s projects. This is also how we work alongside our clients’ IT staff: we stand in for their IT person during vacations, and in the Romanian subsidiaries of multinationals we work alongside the group’s IT.

The focus is on delivering a service that is profitable for both sides.

3. SMEs are outsourcing IT more and more often

Digital transformation, which drives IT outsourcing, was long backed mainly by large companies. However, the growing number of small businesses and startups has brought increasing demand for outsourcing companies from that side too.

Small businesses outsource to cut costs, to focus on their core business, to deal with staff shortages and to get better quality.

A study by Clutch showed that over 37% of small businesses had outsourced business processes in 2018, for efficiency and for access to specialists.

The same goes for startups: in 2021, the startup economy was worth more than $2.8 trillion, and more and more entrepreneurs were leaving their 9-to-5 jobs to start their own businesses. For a startup, funding is hard to keep under control, and a full-time technical team is expensive. That’s why many choose a remote team or a dedicated provider, especially when they want to launch their product quickly.

For a company with 5–10 employees, a full-time IT person is rarely justified, even though the needs are the same as at a large company: email, backup, security, laptops set up for new hires. And going digital has become partly mandatory: since 2024, invoices between companies in Romania are sent through RO e-Factura, the national e-invoicing system. We wrote about what this means in practice on our page about IT for companies with up to 10 employees.

Backup as a Service: tell me more →

4. Backsourcing remains the exception

For many companies, an outsourcing plan used to end with backsourcing. What does that actually mean?

Backsourcing is the process by which organizations bring outsourced activities back to in-house teams. Many companies, especially startups, believed that after outsourcing product development in the early stages, they would hire an in-house team once the business gained traction.

In 2021, the “Outsourcing in 2021” survey showed that 61% of companies and 57% of outsourcing service providers believed backsourcing would be less important that year. Still, the pandemic pushed some companies to temporarily bring certain services back in-house, to fill the gaps and keep their business running.

Reversibility in outsourcing is only possible if the company organizes its functions in a modular way, which takes capital and technical capacity. Backsourcing hasn’t disappeared: some large companies bring back in-house the functions they consider strategic. For small and medium-sized companies, however, building and keeping a full IT team remains expensive and difficult, in a market where specialists are in high demand.

What matters is that an outsourcing contract allows a clean exit at any time, with the documentation handed over and access transferred. At RezolvIT, the contract has no minimum term and 30 days’ notice, and when we take over from another provider, we draw up a written plan within 24 hours, covering the handover of access and documentation and the changing of passwords.

5. Results-based contracts: SLAs and monthly reports

Another change announced in 2021 concerned the basis on which IT outsourcing contracts are signed. Instead of traditional contracts based on project, technology, price or time, contracts are increasingly tied to results.

Companies are becoming more risk-aware, so they prefer contracts based on results, not just on activities. This type of outsourcing reduces risk for the client and motivates the provider. A GSA report cited at the time showed that 92% of companies outsourcing software development to India or other emerging economies had understood the importance of results-based contracts.

For managed IT services, results are measured in concrete terms: the response times written into the contract (SLA), system availability, incidents resolved and a monthly report. At RezolvIT, for example, we answer the phone within 15 minutes, respond remotely within one hour and on site within 2 – 4 hours, depending on the plan, and clients receive a monthly report.

The simplest form is a fixed monthly plan, which tells you up front how much your IT will cost. See IT plans.

6. Romania on the IT outsourcing map

India long remained the top destination for IT outsourcing, and companies trusted it for its cost advantages. In 2017, IT services exports from India and China reached about $150 billion. At the time, India had around 2.75 million programmers, and China 7 million. Since then, many other countries have come to offer the same advantages.

The pandemic sped up the change: with many countries in lockdown, companies that had outsourced their work far away ran into continuity problems and looked to closer providers, in countries that were less affected.

For European companies, Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania and Poland, has become an important alternative: the same or a nearby time zone, the same European legislation (GDPR, NIS2) and specialists who speak foreign languages. In 2020, Romania had more than 120,000 software developers. We’ve written more about the advantages of outsourcing to Romania in a separate article: why to outsource IT services in Romania.

When competition grows, providers in each country try to gain an edge, whether through better quality, better prices or other benefits, and companies looking for IT services gain from this competition. For the subsidiaries of multinationals, language matters too: the RezolvIT team provides support in Romanian, English, German, French and Spanish.

7. Automation, monitoring and artificial intelligence

In 2021, we expected the outsourcing model based on services delivered by people and supported by tools to turn into one in which services are delivered by digital tools and coordinated by people.

That prediction has largely come true. Managed IT services today rely on remote monitoring and management platforms, which install updates, check backups and flag problems before users notice them. At RezolvIT, remote support is provided through the MspCoreX app.

Process automation, software robots and machine learning have become commonplace, and since 2023 generative artificial intelligence has made its way into work tools as well: assistants that summarize tickets, write scripts or answer simple questions. But the role of people hasn’t shrunk to controlling the tools: complex problems, decisions and client relationships remain in their hands.

Virtualization and the cloud let providers use standardized IT infrastructure that is easy to manage. We explained the difference in our article on virtualization and cloud computing.

Managed cloud: tell me more →

8. Security and business continuity at the heart of the contract

During the pandemic, with employees working from home, companies reviewed their outsourcing contracts: VPN, project security, metrics for remote work. Those lessons still hold, and security has also become a legal obligation: NIS2, transposed into Romanian law by Government Emergency Ordinance (GEO) 155/2024, requires companies in the covered sectors to manage their cybersecurity risks, including the risks that come from suppliers.

The approaches we recommended in 2021 for coming out of the pandemic stronger still apply today:

1. Use real-time monitoring tools, so you know what your provider is doing and can track every performance indicator.
2. Include disaster recovery strategies in the outsourcing contract.
3. Automate repetitive tasks, so you depend less on human capacity.
4. Focus on critical business processes and reallocate resources to priority projects.
5. Take information security and the protection of your IT infrastructure seriously, including with an incident response plan.
6. Consider moving to the cloud where it brings a real advantage.

What should you check before outsourcing IT?

Before you choose a provider, ask for clear answers to a few questions:

• Who responds, and how quickly? Response times must be written into the contract.
• What does the plan include, and what is paid for separately?
• Does the contract have a minimum term? What is the notice period?
• How does the takeover from your current provider work, and how are the documentation, access and passwords handed over at the end?
• What certifications does the provider have (for example ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001), and how is your company’s data protected?
• Do you receive regular reports on the work done?
• Can the provider come on site, not just work remotely?

RezolvIT has been working with more than 200 client companies since 2005, is certified to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001, and provides on-site support in Bucharest and across Romania. The exact price of the services is based on a free IT audit.

RezolvIT is an IT outsourcing company that successfully supports its clients, whether it’s securing their infrastructure or helping their employees work from home. You’ll find all the details about the service on our IT Outsourcing page.