Your server farm just crashed and your Network Engineer is in Aruba" again"
Your best Developer just walked out the door because someone found a bug in his latest API"
You don"t have a QA Team" you aren"t even sure what a QA Team is"
These and many more reasons will send even the best IT Managers scurrying to find a way to outsource their problems and turn them into solutions. So, how do you go about finding an IT outsourcing provider that you can trust?
Ask your employees
The people who currently work with or for you can be the best source of information and experience about an IT outsourcing provider. One or more of your employees may have worked for provider in the past and may still have contacts at the company.
Using the case of the server farm crash, one of your employees may have worked at a data center. They may highly recommend outsourcing the server farm management to the company that runs the data center and provide you with a contact still at the company.
Ask for referrals from your professional group
If you don"t have employees at this time or there is not anyone on the staff that has experience with the IT outsourcing provider that you are looking for, then check with your local IT networking professional group.
In the case of the QA Team, you decide to outsource all of the quality assurance work. You go to your monthly (or weekly) IT Managers group and there just happens to be someone there who owns or manages a QA Consulting Practice. They give you an overview of what a QA outsourcing provider can do for you and give you their contact information.
Find a referral service
If checking with people you know for a personal referral has not provided the resource you are looking for, the next step is to find a referral service. A referral service about an IT outsourcing provider can come in many flavors. There are professional websites that provide referrals (where the providers have paid for a listing), there are people with blogs that give reviews of firms they have worked for, and there are informal review sites where companies can chime in with their opinion of the latest outsource firm that they worked with.
With your Developer leaving, you realize that you want to outsource the rest of the project development and do a search on a referral site for local API Development Companies and you find one with good reviews.
Google it (or Bing it)
Sometimes, a Google search of exactly what you are looking for can bring you just that - exactly what you are looking for.