The IT world is constantly evolving and innovating, and the IT Outsourcing industry has to grow in parallel to continue to meet the needs of their clients. Here are some new and persisting trends to look out for in the rest of 2016.

1. Outsourcing IT Trends 2016

2. The Cloud
Many business processes have already successfully migrated fully or
partially to the cloud. It is expected that this trend will continue, and, as
cloud security and reliability keep improving, we’ll even see more critical
processes moved to the cloud. Disaster Recovery in particular is seeing a
lot of success in shifting several aspects to the cloud and away from older,
tape-based backups.

3. Security
Data security is a growing concern for all industries. Data loss can
be extremely expensive and damaging for any business, with a
single breach potentially costing over $35,000. Outsourcing
companies will have to clearly demonstrate that they are able to keep
their clients’ data safe in spite of frequent, sophisticated attempts at
theft by malicious actors. Otherwise, more businesses may be
swayed to keep or move projects in-house.

4. Specialized Expertise
While cost is, and likely always be, a major motivating factor for outsourcing, more
businesses are finding that outsourcing is also a viable solution for filling gaps in
knowledge and expertise. There are, for instance, very few programmers who are
extensively familiar with languages like COBOL which are used in mainframe computing.
Outsourcing is a way to gain access to programmers with this knowledge without having
to hire additional, expensive full-time staff.

5. Offshored Projects and Departments Returning
to the US
Offshoring has long appeared to be an attractive proposition due to low initial
costs, many companies are reporting growing dissatisfaction with the results
of their offshored projects and departments. Significant language and cultural
barriers have created delays and miscommunications, resulting in lower
quality work than expected. As such, many companies are likely to bring their
work back to the US. To keep costs low, however, they will likely seek to
outsource within the US.

6. Small Businesses Embrace ITO
As entrepreneurs look to grow their
small businesses, they are
increasingly finding that there is a
tremendous value in IT
Outsourcing. In 2016 and beyond,
entrepreneurs will outsource several
IT processes, such as data backup
or mainframe application hosting, to
reduce cost and allow their
companies to put more time and
resources into developing their core
competencies.

7. Big Data Analysis
Companies are collecting more data than ever on their customers and their habits.
Making use of this data, however, is a significant challenge for many. Look for IT
Outsourcing companies to provide data analysis solutions to help their clients make
sense of everything that they’re collecting.

8. Internet of Things
As more and more devices and objects are becoming
network-enabled each day, IT Outsourcing firms will need to
be able to integrate such technology into their services. As
the Internet of Things grows, it is expected to become a
multi-trillion dollar industry by the 2020s, and ITO companies
will need to be able deploy code and support for a wide
variety of machine and devices.