Outsourcing becomes the new normal, and it reshapes the whole global industry. Big data and artificial intelligence, automation, and personalization along with many other global transformations are radically changing the way IT business operates. As a result, more and more organizations decide to outsource their IT related tasks.

Global Skill Shortages

The lack of in-house engineering talent is one of the main drivers of the IT outsourcing industry. According to the latest survey, put together by the Edge Foundation, an independent education foundation the U.K. economy is seeing nearly 600,000 vacancies in digital technology making the UK lose around£63 billion annually.  In addition, more than 70% of technology employers in the UK expect to face a talent shortage during the next year.

The tech talent gap is also a growing problem in the United States. A report by Gartner predicts that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer specialist job openings.  It will create a talent shortage that universities will find challenging to fill, even at 30%.

While according to the auditing firm KPMG which surveyed over 3,000 technology leaders 65% of the respondents mentioned that hiring challenges are hurting the industry. That number has seen a 6 percent increase compared to last year’s survey, where 59% expressed that sentiment

Cloud sourcing

Over the last few years, there has been a shift towards cloud-based hosting of applications and infrastructure. As a result, the demand for cloud computing is expected to increase in the coming years. According to a recent Gartner survey, this shift towards cloud will impact $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020. As organizations will require cloud platforms the demand for cloud outsourcing will see major growth.

The rise of Virtual/Augmented Reality projects

The VR industry is growing at a fast pace. The market size of virtual reality hardware and software is expected to grow from 2.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 to more than 19 billion U.S. dollars by 2020. According to different forecast the revenue from the global virtual reality market has been estimated to be around 21.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

As AR/VR technologies are transforming the shopping experience organizations will be looking to outsource in order to make the product more convenient for its end user.

Increasing focus on cybersecurity and compliance

Cybersecurity has become a topic of interest to almost all organizations as cyber-attacks are increasing in sophistication and magnitude. As direct result regulators increase their focus on cyber risks and controls.  According to a recent report published by the U.S. Security Exchange Commission, the average cost of a cyber data breach is $7.5 Million and this figure keeps rising year over year.

1,946,181,599 is the total number of records containing personal and other sensitive data that have been exposed to data breaches between Jan. 1, 2017, and March 20, 2018. In order to prevent this, the European Union has implemented in 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that obliges all companies regardless of their location to protect the gained data.

IT companies are implementing a multi-level security approach and to eliminate risks and guard business data they are using the help of outsourced cybersecurity services.