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Shift Ahead Offshore Network Teams Reduce IT Costs
- Rajeeb Ghosh
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Save Costs with Offshore Network Providers - Committed and Dedicated
Maximizing return on investment (ROI): Dedicated offshore network engineering that cut infrastructure costs
Enterprise organizations sometimes feel as if the world is against them. On one hand they need uninterrupted, 24/7 resilient networks and on the other, domestic technical talent is getting more and more expensive. So, in fact, a lot of Chief Technology Officers find the in-house network management model a waste of their precious financial resources.
At Shift Ahead, we know about the increase in "Dedicated Offshore Engineering" which is a bigger step than simple outsourcing, with provision of high-tier committed technical assets that fit directly into the client's DNA.
The Problem: Scaling Infrastructure without Leading to Huge Operating Costs
Last year one of the top customers, a global Tier-1 E-commerce platform had a problem. Their net-work was distributed over different continents and due to the growing use of hybrid-cloud architectures, the internal network operations center (NOC) costs were steadily rising by 22% year-on-year.
In particular, it was the expense of Level 3 (L3) engineers in North America and Western Europe that pushed the costs up where the median salary for a Senior Network Architect is currently over $150,000 excluding benefits and overheads.
This customer didn’t want a solution to barely "band-aid" the issues but one that would even forecast the problems and take care of the SD-WAN deployments and BGP routing optimizations.
What is more - they also needed a dedicated team that is, working exclusively for the client, contrary to the shared-resource pool typical of low-cost, low-quality MSPs.
The Plan - Strategic Phase-wise Execution: Achieving the Committed Offshore Model
Shift Ahead’s team faced the challenge of transitioning from a local-only approach to a “Committed Offshore” model with this client. Our team built this efficient solution on three technological pillars:
Focused Talent Integration: When you outsource, you often get an engineer who is working for many customers, usually around 5 different clients. However, we provided a specialized team of six CCIE and CCNP engineers. These specialists were integrated into client’s internal Slack, Jira and GitHub technologies making cultural and technical integration extremely straightforward.
Follow-the-Sun Operational Efficiency: Offshore time zones were used to decrease the 30% “night-shift differential” “pay” necessary under domestic 24/7 coverage circumstances.
Technical Standardization: We used Terraform and Ansible to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure that the offshore team could always control the global network state in the same manner, which cut down human mistakes, roughly, by 40%.
Gradual Implementation: From Audit to Autonomy
The whole modifications was implemented in 12 weeks to assure virtually zero downtime for the e-commerce platform’s millions of daily users.
Phase 1: Shadowing & Knowledge Transfer (Weeks 1-4):
The offshore team adjusting to the client process occurred at the same time they were recording the setup of the previous network and noticing the “technical debt” in the routing tables.
Phase 2: Hybrid management (Weeks 5-8):
The offshore crew had a significant position with the responsibility for Tier 1 and Tier 2 tickets during domestic “after-hours” and there were no difficulties in getting the supervision from domestic authorities.
Phase 3: Full Autonomy and Optimization (Weeks 9-12):
The offshore team took full charge of monitoring network health. The switch made by the client from the old MPLS circuits to SD-WAN not only resulted in a monthly saving of 12,000$ in additional circuit costs but also gave the client more time they could devote to strategic tasks.
Results - Hard Figures: Who Was the Beneficiary?
Dedicated offshore opened up the potential financial benefits which were significant. For companies that use a dedicated offshore network provider, as per the latest benchmarks, the "Cost per Ticket" has been reduced on average by 55%, but for our client, the impact went much further:
Total Operational Savings: Observed 48% decrease in network payroll and overhead expenditures annually.
Resolution Speed: The client’s team’s familiarity with the infrastructure led to a 35% improvement in the Meantime to Repair (MTTR), a key performance indicator.
Capital Reinvestment: Our client used average of $1.2M saved in year one to further increase AI-driven consumer customization.
Why "Dedicated" will be the Future of Network Management
The reality is, the future of economical networking rests with the “Committed” paradigm. At Shift Ahead, our belief is that upgrading network reliability should not be a privilege to few.
When companies opt for a dedicated offshore partner instead of a regular service provider, they get a team with the deep knowledge that in-house staff have along with the budget freedom that an offshore global delivery center offers.
In today’s world, where uptime is equal to earnings, simply handing over work is not the wise move, rather, bringing onboard people who are committed to your uptime as much as you are is the way forward.
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