Corporate Kenya has scaled up the outsourcing of part or entire IT departments to cut costs associated with hiring and buying expensive equipment in a difficult business environment.

Services on the outsourcing list include data creation, storage, leasing of IT equipment, software and security management.

A number of providers have launched the managed services departments or start offering these services, which observers say can save corporate and small and medium enterprises SME up to 30 per cent of IT related costs.

In the last one month, firms that have unveiled their offerings include, Kenya Data Networks, through a sister company called eSecurity, UUNET, and Comtec.

The pressure of hiring and maintaining high skilled human resource, an ever-evolving threat landscape, the need for trimming capital expenditure, and concentrating on their core businesses have motivated the trend.

This comes on the background of improved telecommunications infrastructure that has resulted into faster Internet connection and more bandwidth, thus providing opportunity for big firms and SMEs to embrace online transactions.

Nonetheless, security risks remain a major concern for data and network.