This afternoon we had an interesting panel session on outsourcing, with perhaps a surprising degree of agreement. Outsourcing seems likely to become an increasingly common choice for commodity services that can be well-defined and where sharing provision with others can give economies of scale. However it is essential to fully understand the service first: for example outsourcing website management on a pay-per-change model resulted in an increasingly stale site. Security is often a concern when outsourcing, though a recent ENISA report concluded that there could be advantages as well as problems.
One major concern is who sets the terms for outsourcing: us, the outsourcer or, if we do not manage them, our individual users! Many of the popular outsourced platforms had fixed terms and conditions, though these are becoming more flexible (for example to address regulatory concerns over logs and stored data), and some options may be available at additional cost.
One area where further developments are still needed is the use of open standards, both to allow integration of outsourced services with internally operated ones and to reduce the risk of becoming locked in to a single outsourcing platform, either by data or software formats or by transfer costs. Persuading vendors that this is in their interest is likely to need joint efforts at national/NREN or higher level.
Overall the panellists were optimistic about a future containing outsourced services: making boring things a matter of contract management should give us more time for enjoyable innovation.
