outsourcing

Outsourcing is a strategy for outsourcing data centers and services in order to reduce the costs of the technical infrastructure, maintenance and personnel.

Based on outsourcing strategies in the USA, an initially very controversial discussion about the outsourcing of data processing services also began in Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. Although user companies had already made use of software houses, consultants and other service providers in the past, outsourcing strategies were now understood to mean the outsourcing of very extensive DP functions up to and including the outsourcing of the company's own data center, data center outsourcing( DCO).

Critics of outsourcing put forward in particular the thesis of the risky dependencies into which a user enters. Proponents, on the other hand, emphasize the cost advantages and the technical benefits of reducing over-complexity and increasing innovation dynamics and the level of security. Economic considerations in particular led to a rapidly increasing number of companies turning to outsourcing. At the same time, the provider market developed with disproportionately high growth rates, with Debis (Stuttgart), EDS (Rüsselsheim) and ORGA (Karlsruhe) among the largest service providers.

Classic outsourcing has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, and is now presented under the umbrella term provider. What used to be provided by service bureaus and service providers in outsourcing is now done by various service providers( SP). Regardless of whether it's a service or computing power, the provision of servers, mass storage or security, there are corresponding providers for almost every service and for every equipment.

This development goes directly hand in hand with modern IT strategies such as utility computing, cloud computing, software as a service( SaaS), data center as a service( DCaaS) or data center outsourcing (DCO).