Outsourcing is a strategy that the firms and corporations are increasingly using to reduce costs and increase their share of profit. Although companies found outsourcing as one of the significant ways of minimizing costs, but the risks involved in it should also be considered. It is expensive to maintain a large application development and testing staff. So more and more companies favor outsourcing to specialist third parties, who have experienced and skilled resources.
It has often been seen that industries, which have no history of outsourcing often finds it difficult to complete its outsource project successfully as against companies that have knowledge in outsourcing. Most of the projects undertaken by retail and public sectors are successful (77.5% and 65% respectively) where as the transport and financial sector show massive failures because of their inexperience and lack of knowledge about outsourcing.
Careful planning and control are the key determinants in seamless completion of a project. The primary reason for outsourcing is to develop software applications at a reduced cost and also the need to boost resources through access to skilled resources. It is generally expected that outsourcing will increase in the next few years. Although the rate of increase will be lower than as compared to the prior aggressive growth, but at least 20 per cent growth is expected.
If you aim to increase the share of your profit through outsourcing, the first thing that you need to determine is a reliable business partner. An organization should entrust the responsibility of outsourcing to a chosen partner. Thus the organization needs to follow secure coding best practices, the application that has been developed with adequate levels of security. The importance of security increases even more as the organizations are outsourcing such sensitive data as financial and human resource application.
Public sector and retail are the two industries that outsource their sensitive documents and even then they have fewer issues with their projects. The very fact that legal action has been taken in some cases describes that there is a problem in the contract that provides nothing for the companies to fall back on. Hence outsourcing may not be considered as risk, so long as the correct strategies are taken. Experience plays an important role here.
Thus if a company does not have experience in outsourcing, it is likely that it can attract penalties thereby reducing its profitability and adding to the cost of the outsourcer. Before a company starts any of its outsourcing projects, it is important that it gets the contract right. No matter how much time is required, the company should set what are the goals for the development for a particular application or service. The requirement of software or a particular service should form the basis of any contract and it should be reinforced through any service level agreement.
It is also important that the outsourcing company should identify the requirements for application security and also the tools and techniques required to develop the software application in a safe environment. But this is not enough. The company has to have some kind of certification to assure the outsourcers about the security.
It is the responsibility of the organizations to define the tools and techniques that the outsourcer company should use. New vulnerabilities and vectors can occur at any point while providing service. But all vulnerabilities are not of the same order. So it is again the responsibility of the organization to prioritize vulnerabilities depending on the risk level.
The outsourcer should be able to assure the providing company that it can gauge any vulnerability that may arise during the process. In order to ensure the clients that the application has been tested at different stages of the software development cycle, the outsourcer must specify the exact security testing techniques that they use.
As security is the key criterion for outsourcing, it is better that the initial security testing is done by the clients. This, of course, does not mean that the organizations will not test the security by themselves. But it is considered best practice for the outsourcer to write that the client has the right to audit the security before application.
At Promantra Synergy Solutions, we adhere to a stringent rule when it comes to data protection and information security. Certified by the International Business Standard of ISO 27001:2005, data protection and information security are considered most crucial to all our HIPAA complaint healthcare services.
This is further enforced by our unique Healthcare Information Suite: GeroPro. The GeroPro platform gives us a unique flexibility of working with sensitive data in a completely secure platform. Before use, our software undergoes a thorough process of testing using the standards of SDLC. With a complete assurance for data protection and security, Promantra assures high-end quality work in a secured environment at a cost that is most reasonable.
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