Information Systems and Organizational Structure

Subject: Tech & Engineering
Pages: 2
Words: 356
Reading time:
2 min

IS has affected the structure and work roles of almost all the functions in an organizational infrastructure through maintaining and assessing the quality of its employees which conforms to the IT staffing, planning, recruiting, training, and retaining its staff. Limiting IT in the CEO or CTO position is outdated by the current IT functional trends whose best example is that of outsourcing and offshoring IT and IS processes. Outsourcing strategies IS function is not limited to software application development which has many benefits for IT businesses, small and medium-sized firms. The main advantage behind outsourcing is cost reduction from 40 to 80 percent while focussing on competent professionals who are more flexible than regularly hired employees.

The decision to outsource the work or talent is largely based on the security resources and knowledge available to the organizations depending upon their capacity, workgroup, and size. In case the company holds a strong, dedicated security staff, it might consider keeping everything in-house, however, if security resources are lacking, feeling secure is critical to a business, where the firm might want to outsource the entire function. Many small-sized firms fall in the middle, though, keeping the majority of the work in-house and outsourcing the functions in which they are weakest, such as 24/7 monitoring of IDS logs or their firewall configuration. However, the CEO might have issues with outsourcing security functions as security is sensitive area-allowing proprietary data to fall into the wrong hands can be detrimental to a company. Therefore outsourcing security functions is a decision that requires dedicated staff and should not be taken unconscientiously without inspecting each prospective vendor.

The outsourcing decision requires the precise requirement of determining exactly what one needs to be outsourced in context with the needs of the resources that do not require full outsourcing of the security group. For this purpose, the function must not be limited to the CEO of the firm so that professional developers may, look into adding more services, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), access control, policy development, and architectural design of the customer’s project.