In-house vs outsourced DevOps: the comparison with the compliance column in it

The standard version of this comparison sets an offshore hourly rate against a local salary, produces a large percentage, and stops. It is not wrong, it is just not the argument. Anyone senior enough to sign the contract already knows offshore is cheaper per hour. What they do not know is what it costs them in the columns the vendor left out.

So here is the version with those columns. Every external figure below is linked at the end with its sample size and date. Where a number people usually quote turns out to be unverifiable, we say that instead of repeating it.

The salary column, done properly

Start with what an in-house DevOps engineer is paid, from sources that state their samples:

• United States — median salary $165,000 for a DevOps engineer, and $189,000 for a cloud infrastructure engineer, from Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey (23,928 salary responses, 5,239 of them US).
• United Kingdom — median permanent salary £70,000, from ITJobsWatch, across 3,899 advertisements quoting a salary in the six months to 22 October 2026.
• Australia — A$115,000 to A$135,000 average on SEEK as of October 2026; Morgan McKinley's 2026 guide puts Sydney at an average of A$160,000 with a range of A$130,000 to A$210,000.

Salary is not cost. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data for June 2026 puts benefits at 30.0% of total compensation for private-industry workers. Applying that ratio to the $165,000 median gives a fully loaded figure of roughly $236,000 a year — before recruitment, equipment, software, management overhead or the cost of the role sitting empty.

That $236,000 is arithmetic, not a survey finding: a sourced median multiplied by a sourced benefits ratio. We are showing the working so you can disagree with the inputs rather than the conclusion.

Against that, one offshore engineer at $40 an hour on a 160-hour month is $76,800 a year, all-inclusive. The ratio is roughly three to one. That is the number every vendor leads with, and it is the least interesting thing on this page.

The number we will not give you

Comparisons like this usually include a time-to-hire figure — ninety-five days for a senior engineer is the one in circulation. We went looking for its source. It traces to a blog post by the chief executive of a staff augmentation firm, attributed to Indeed and LinkedIn data with no link to either, and whose own quoted range does not contain the number. The rigorous US series that would settle it, the DHI-DFH mean vacancy duration measure, has been discontinued.

So we are not going to tell you how long it takes to hire a DevOps engineer, because we cannot support it. What we can offer instead is a verifiable proxy for the cost of covering the gap: ITJobsWatch puts the median UK DevOps contract rate at £525 a day across 3,999 advertisements in the six months to 19 October 2026. That is roughly £11,000 a month to hold the position open with a contractor, and it is a real number with a stated sample.

We mention this because a comparison is only as good as its weakest figure, and a vendor who quotes an invented statistic in the cost section has told you something about the rest of the document.

The column that actually decides it

If you run an estate that carries a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 obligation, the build-versus-buy question is not really about money. It is about whether a third party can touch production without breaking your own attestation, and most vendor comparisons are silent on it because the honest answer is uncomfortable.

The discomfort is justified by the data. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, built on more than 22,000 incidents and 12,195 confirmed breaches, found third-party involvement in 30% of breaches — double the previous year. Separately, Vanta's 2025 State of Trust survey of 3,500 leaders across five countries found organisations spending nine working weeks a year on vendor security reviews alone, and an earlier wave found half of organisations had ended a vendor relationship over a security concern.

In other words: your reviewer is right to be difficult, and the vendor's job is to make the review cheap rather than to argue with it. These are the questions that decide the engagement, and they should be answered before the commercial conversation rather than after:

1. 01Does the vendor's ISO 27001 or SOC 2 scope actually cover the delivery centre and the people who will touch your systems, or only their corporate IT? Ask for the scope statement, not the badge.
2. 02What exactly can those engineers do in production — least privilege, time-bound, broker-mediated, session-recorded? Or a standing admin credential?
3. 03Will the vendor sign as a subprocessor, and will your auditor accept them inside your own scope? Can you have the bridge letter and the auditor's name?
4. 04Where does your data physically sit, under which jurisdiction, and what is the liability cap if the vendor causes the breach?
5. 05How fast are credentials revoked when one of their engineers leaves, and who verifies it?

An in-house hire answers all five trivially, and that is the real argument for building rather than buying. A vendor who cannot answer them in writing is more expensive than they look, whatever the hourly rate says.

Our own answers are on the security page, including the registry facts for the contracting entity, because a reviewer should be able to verify the counterparty exists before they spend time on the controls.

The timezone column, stated as a failure mode

The most repeated complaint about offshore engineering is not quality, it is latency — and the clearest statement of it we have read came from a practitioner rather than a vendor: finding a problem with offshore work on a Friday morning and knowing no fix will arrive until Tuesday. No asynchronous process fixes that.

Two things genuinely mitigate it and one does not. Contracted overlap hours work, because an engineer whose shift covers your afternoon is available when you find the problem. Seniority works, because the failure mode is someone stopping at the edge of the specification rather than deciding; a senior engineer keeps going. What does not work is a vendor promising to be flexible.

The corollary is an advantage worth naming. A maintenance window that is an overnight call-out for a US or UK team is an ordinary afternoon in India, which is why patching, upgrades and restarts are genuinely cheaper to buy offshore than to roster locally.

The columns that favour building

A comparison that concludes 'buy' on every row is marketing. These rows genuinely favour an in-house hire:

• Context accumulates in someone who stays. An engineer who has been in your estate for three years is worth more than the same engineer elsewhere, and that value is yours rather than rented.
• Compliance scope is simpler. One fewer subprocessor, one fewer questionnaire, one fewer liability conversation.
• Synchronous work is free. If your architecture decisions get made in unscheduled conversation, offshore friction is real and permanent.
• You are not exposed to vendor attrition. Though you are exposed to your own, and a single in-house DevOps engineer is a single point of failure that a bench is not.
• No commercial incentive conflict. Which matters most in cloud cost work: ask any provider pricing on a percentage of your cloud spend what happens to their fee in a quarter where they halve it.

When the honest answer is both

The pattern that works most often is not either column. It is one in-house owner who holds the architecture, the credentials and the relationship with your auditor, and bought capacity underneath them for the work that is real but does not need to be local: patching, monitoring, pipeline maintenance, cost work, out-of-hours cover.

That shape answers the compliance column, because your own employee holds root. It answers the timezone column, because the bought capacity is doing the work that suits a different clock. And it answers the cost column without pretending the cheap option is free.

It also happens to be the shape we sell most of, which you should weigh accordingly — but the reasoning stands on its own and you can check every figure above.

Sahil Dubey

Group Managing Director

Runs engineering and compliance across the group. Twenty years in infrastructure, most of it on the operations side of systems that were already in production when he inherited them.

• CISA
• AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate