Discussion on:

Outsourcing System Admin role in a medium company

Recently our upper management came with the idea of outsourcing the System Admin role (networking, server admin, security). I was wondering if you heard or experienced such a change, and what are the pros and cons. My position (as Head of IT) is against such move. While I agree that some basic admin tasks can be performed from outside, seeing the small daily issues/problems I am afraid we will loose at least resolution time for these, and while relatively small organisation (60 in the head office + about 60 in remote offices) we have a quite complex setup : virtualisation, disaster recovery site, VPN for rep offices + small networks in the bigger of these remote offices, of which our current Sys Admin is 100% familiar. I agree that nobody is ireplaceable, however, even if he leaves I would hire a Sys Admin who can take over I think a 3rd party can never get that familiar with the setup.
What is the trend lately, is outsourcing still the way to go ?

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-problems-with-outsourcing-it/3016?tag=content;siu-container

I would like to hear some pros though (examples whe outsourcing was clearly a winner), and not from a company that provides the outsourcing.