The conversation around global hiring has quietly shifted from "how do we cut costs" to "where do we actually find the people." The world is short an estimated 4.8 million cybersecurity specialists alone, and demand for engineers with modern cloud, AI, and full-stack skills continues to outpace what domestic hiring markets in the US, UK, and Australia can supply — a gap that shows up as longer hiring timelines and rising wages rather than empty job postings.
That pressure is exactly why the composition of outsourcing demand has changed. Cybersecurity has gone from being one of the least outsourced IT functions in 2023 to the single most outsourced function in 2026, tied with general IT infrastructure at 72%. It's no longer just large enterprises making this move either — around 90% of large organizations now outsource at least one core IT function, and a growing share of small businesses are following the same path for the same reason: the talent they need simply isn't available fast enough locally.
What's changed most is what businesses expect once they commit to this model. Roughly 81% of organizations now want an outsourcing partner to function as a genuine extension of their strategy, not a vendor executing a fixed spec, and nearly half of all new outsourcing contracts now build AI and automation capability in from day one rather than treating it as a future add-on.
For a business weighing whether to keep trying to hire locally or open the door to international engineering talent, the honest framing in 2026 isn't a cost comparison anymore — it's a timeline comparison. The businesses moving fastest are the ones who've accepted that the best available engineer for a given problem might not be down the street, and have built a hiring process, like ours, that can bring that person onto the team in weeks rather than months.
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