The hottest trend in IT today, outsourcing, has recently become more prevalent in the realm of network services. The hottest trend in IT today, outsourcing, has recently become more prevalent in the realm of network services. "Outsourcing my DNS management has been great," says Andrew Loyer of LoyerTCG, a boutique website development firm. "UltraDNS (a managed domain name service) provides us with a specialized DNS service for our network. They monitor each A record we specify in our domain records. If UltraDNS detects that a record is unavailable, they update the DNS record automatically and switch over to the other facility by updating the A record to another IP address. UltraDNS is robust enough to set the TTL (Time To Live) attribute of the domain record down to five minutes instead of the usual eight hours or more. So, the local DNS servers refresh their cache every five minutes."

But outsourcing can also be a nightmare, as one of my students recently illustrated, "There was a company in Dayton that decided to outsource much of its IT and production to a foreign company about five years ago. After about nine months of outsourcing, the company realized that there was a huge loss in quality for both production and IT support. The company decided to cancel the contract and rehire their old employees. They ended up getting most of their old employees back but at a higher wage than before. Most people would think that the story ends there. However, as hard as it is to believe, the company is actually considering outsourcing again. They think it will be different this time. It will be interesting to see what happens."

You may be saying, "What? Outsource our network services!? Without those critical services, our network is down and we''re practically out of business!" But that is exactly why you should be considering outsourcing. If done correctly, it can be the most cost effective way to stretch your precious IT dollars and gain valuable expertise in support of your IT infrastructure without breaking the bank. On the downside, if you are not careful, you can end up paying much more for worse service.

What are the tradeoffs of keeping these services in-house vs. outsourcing them? To outsource or not to outsource, that is the question. Let''s take a look at your options.

Outsourcing Network Services
The Application Service Provider model may be officially on hold during the economic downturn, but it certainly isn''t dead. You can outsource practically anything. Web hosting, of course, is old hat with literally hundreds of companies to choose from. However, many companies offer other more specialized services, like DNS, network monitoring, firewalls, and virus protection subscription services