Avoid risks in software development outsourcing trends

by Manh Do Mobile and Application Development

When discussing about trends in offshore software development outsourcing, people usually focus more on the advantages that these trends will bring and rarely mention the risks associated with such trends. The truth is software outsourcing provides benefits but could also provoke risks too.

In this article, we examine some of the software outsourcing trends that might cause risks and explain how those risks can be avoided.

Outsourcing trends of advanced technologies

The demand for outsourcing for innovative and advanced tech such as Big Data, Machine Learning, AR, and blockchain has been gradually gaining popularity in the recent years. Such innovations provide many benefits to businesses, like informed businesses decision making for profitability, boosting employee productivity and more. Through outsourcing services, businesses can get access to such advanced technologies at a very budget costs without having to hire additional personnel. Yet, like any other software development projects, outsourcing of such innovative technologies will come with risks. For instance, if the outsourcing vendor is incompetent in such advanced technologies, or your business can’t seem to manage for a proper adoption of this expensive solutions by your employees leading to waste of money.

How to ensure that you’ll get the benefits of the latest technologies?

In order to avoid or minimize such risks, the first and critical thing to do is to select an software outsourcing company who already has experienced in developing projects with such needed technologies with strong project management skills, and offer to use flexible project management methodologies for it. With this, business will be able to track progress from iteration to iteration, which enables for quick noticing of problems in the early stage of project as well as allowing introducing changes to the project plan during various development stages, or even ending engagement with the outsourcing vendor if they fail to deliver the solutions as needed.

To ensure proper solution adoption by employees and customers, and/or achieve business goals with the application of a chosen technology, businesses can consider the involvement of IT consultants. Many software outsourcing company provides additional IT consulting services at a very inexpensive costs or free of charge as it’s already included in the overall outsourcing budget

Cloud managed services

As cloud computing is taking over traditional It infrastructure for many businesses across multiple industries, the demand for cloud managed and maintenance services is now growing significantly. Cloud technology provides various benefits to businesses including costs reductions, ease of scaling up, and access to the software solutions from anywhere. This is particularly helpful for multinational companies and international enterprises. With outsourcing, companies can get an excellent cloud solution without having to hiring extra cloud engineers. At the same time, cloud technologies provide the extra cybersecurity at no cost so that companies can entrust and migrate their data to the cloud.

How to avoid security risks from cloud sourcing?

Businesses can consider outsourcing cybersecurity services to a managed security services vendor with special expertise in cloud security. Those cybersecurity firms are usually well-versed in cyber and network security, and in particular cloud security to help assess and have a respond plan to avoid cyber-attacks as well as other hacking activities.

Multi-sourcing

Multi sourcing is the practice of dividing your software projects pipeline among a number of outsourcing partners with niche specialty. This approach enables businesses to entrust their various outsourcing functions like Design and Prototype, Engineering, QA and Testing, Project management etc. to the best service providers for each particular one, avoiding locking in the service to one single vendor. Yet, the more vendors, the more complex it becomes to efficiently coordinate the entire project and the chances for risks to arise also increase.

How to ensure proper coordination?

The main factor is to set up a centralized management and establish effective communication and collaboration for all partners. It’s also possible to pick a lead outsourcing partners between all outsourcing companies with the task of putting together all the separate processes of the entire processes