Every business starts out with the basics: a few desks, laptops, staff and a couple of rented rooms. Then, things start to grow and pretty soon there is more electronics involved than the business is comfortable handling on its own.

In today’s business culture, businesses are usually advised to focus on their primary business process and leave the rest to those that know how to do it better. This, it is assumed, leads to the businesses being leaner, and hence, stronger competitors in their respective markets because they no longer need to be bothered or be held back by the peripheral supporting processes.

That makes business sense, right? In fact, ideally you would remove all the tech jobs in your business, hand it over to someone that supports you and give your 100% to the business at hand.

But, is that a wise decision? Let’s look at some reasons why you shouldn’t outsource all your technology tasks:

You Can Afford It

If you can afford having a website administrator or designer on a full-time basis, by all means keep them. It is always better to work with your own staff than it is to ask your webhosting provider to do stuff for you.

Besides, your staff knows what you do more than the outsiders (staff at your hosting provider). They can get any configurations and modifications done to your exact specification without having to go through several trials and errors.

Social Media Should Come From the Heart

Social media networks are your way of reaching out to your clients and customers. Every word you send out into the world must come from the heart – from you or one of your employees, at the very least. Do not think that your online readers will not notice how “cold” the messages that are sent out to them are.

Unless you hire someone who is really good at convincing people, your readers will realize that your tweets or posts are made by someone who knows too little or cares less about your services.

Branding is Integral

The real pain about having multiple outsourced tasks is maintaining the quality and brand your business should always aspire to keep and improve on. While everything in-house can be closely monitored to ensure uniformity in quality, the task becomes much difficult if you have to leave it up to someone else.

Security is of the Utmost Importance

The tech industry is built on trust: with so many hackers out there and with the sophistication level of malware increasing by the day, it is easy to lose your data or have unauthorized eyes prying at it.

If you really want to keep your data secure, then you won’t like having to store it with a hosting provider. Because, no matter how much encryption you have in place and no matter how secure the providers deem their servers to be, there will always be someone who will have full access to it: a system administrator, a manager… someone with enough clout and the right credentials.

Now, in some industries, that person is one person too many. So, if you really want security, you will have to do it within your own network and on your own servers.

Tech Support Should Come from Within

Although it is quite common these days to hear of a company in, say, California to have its tech support phone calls answered by someone somewhere in Asia, we have all heard about the frustrations people vent about it: they (the tech guys) can’t understand what is being said. Even if they do, they do not have enough knowledge about the whole business process to give instant replies and solutions. They are half way across the world, and hence, they cannot reach the person responsible for resolving the issues for clarifications because they are probably tucked in bed. Different time zones come with their own headaches

If you want your customers to be happy with your support, give them a local person whom they can truly “bond” or identify with.

Data-Intensive Businesses Processes

If your business is data-driven and you need to be kept in the loop 24/7, then you would rather have all the information you require at your fingertips than having to ask third-party members for it. If you have to make minute-by-minute decisions based the on the data feed, you don’t want to have to be constantly accessing it from servers half-way across the world.

The further the data source is away from you, the larger the risks that can befall it: dropped internet connection, malfunction on your hosting provider’s servers, legal issues with them, etc.

So, if you want to make sure you have control over your data and business process, the only way that can guarantee it 100% is having it done by you and your staff. Otherwise, there will always be a chance of losing that control.