Co-sourcing

Co-sourcing is a business practice where a service is performed by both staff from inside an organization and also by an external service provider.

It can be a service performed in concert with a client's existing internal audit department. The scope of work may focus on one or more aspect of the internal audit function.

Examples of co-sourcing services are supplementing the in-house internal audit staff with specialized skill such as information risk management or integrity services, providing routine assistance to in-house auditing for operations and control evaluations in peak period activity and conduct special projects such as fraud investigation or plant investment appraisals.

Another example of co-sourcing is outsourcing part of software development or software maintenance activities to an external organization, while keeping part of the development in-house.

Identity Management Co-Sourcing

It is an approach to Enterprise Identity Management in which the Identity service interacts directly or through some technical footprint with an organization’s information technology (IT) identity backend infrastructure (directories, databases, and other identity repositories). The organization and the external service provider have a shared responsibility for building, hosting and operating the Identity service. The balance of this responsibility can vary depending on the service levels required, and span from an all on-premise deployment, where the Identity service is built, hosted and operated within the organization’s IT infrastructure and managed on-premise by the external service provider; to an all in-the-cloud, where the Identity service is built, hosted and operated by the service provider in an externally hosted, cloud computing infrastructure.