No, it's cheaper to hire someone with the experience if you're doing enough work to justify that person full time. If you're not doing enough to justify full time, then there is a balance point at which it becomes cheaper to outsource. My employer would have to pay 3 times my salary at a minimum to outsource my function, plus technology costs, and my internal knowledge of my employer adds significant value with a potentially multiplicative value that you don't get with outsourcing. Same thing with government and local knowledge.
I'm not against outsourcing, it's the only logical way to handle overflow, or to do a small amount of work that doesn't justify standing up infrastructure and hiring the right people.
No, it's cheaper to hire someone with the experience if you're doing enough work to justify that person full time. If you're not doing enough to justify full time, then there is a balance point at which it becomes cheaper to outsource.
That's just a truism.
My employer would have to pay 3 times my salary at a minimum to outsource my function, plus technology costs, and my internal knowledge of my employer adds significant value with a potentially multiplicative value that you don't get with outsourcing.
Your financial cost to your employer is far more than your salary. Most surveys put the 'real' cost of employing someone at between 40% and 100% of salary (to include deskspace, taxes energy bills, medical costs, holidays, etc). The lowest salary for experienced UK forensic analyst is around £30k. Let's take the mid-point, of 'real' costs to an employee and say it costs the employer 70% of the employees person to use them. So that person costs the employee £51k. Then we need to buy licenses of EnCase, FTK, NetAnalysis and other software and provide them with an analysis machine, a lap top, write blockers, hard drives, a secure lab and a back up solution, etc, etc. £40k minimum, split that over 3 years when items are renewed, so £13.5k a year. Send them on one one-week course a year. That's £2k.
So for one person for one year on a low salary would cost the organisation £65k at least per year. I can't speak about your situation but if a UK local authority could justify that to their electorate when essential services which they're also responsible for like education and cleaning the streets are under massive financial pressure then good luck to them!
When I was at Surrey, they were very proffesional about doing a proper costing of the lab. So for example, we had to include a notional rental of the office space, photocopier etc etc plus all of the "on costs" that an employer has to cover (just as Jonathan pointed out).
I agreed with this as it is how any unit should be done and when this is done, thats when you see the true costs.
The other ellement that is hard to put a price on is reputational risk. If your external expert makes a hash of things (pardon the punn), you dump them and find another one (worst case scenario, sue them), if you as a local authority make a hash of it, who will carry the can?
So for one person for one year on a low salary would cost the organisation £65k at least per year. I can't speak about your situation but if a UK local authority could justify that to their electorate when essential services which they're also responsible for like education and cleaning the streets are under massive financial pressure then good luck to them!
Again, working on the basis that there's enough work being generated in the authority to keep an examiner busy full time, let's say as a starting point that your 65k figure is accurate, and it does seem reasonable to me. I still expect that if one were to outsource the work that person can perform, you'll easily be spending 120k+. So you'll still cover your capital costs in the first year on top of you labour, so there's no question of ROI nor NPV. Let's not forget that when you pay a consultancy, you're not just paying for people, facilities and equipment, you're paying for their sales/marketing overhead, and for their profit margin. Local govs don't market CF capability, and they don't have a profit motive.
I'd also argue that the reputational risk argument is moot since if an authority hires someone who screws up, the authority will wear the responsibility for that anyway. As I explain a lot recently, you can outsource your data, but you can't outsource your obligations.
The big problem, and you see this in the US also, is setting up single person labs, and trying to bootstrap your examiner from scratch. I was fortunate to start my career in a lab with 5 experienced examiners to draw on, and it wasn't until 3 years in that I ran a solo lab operation. I have doubts you could build the same quality of examiner without that mentoring and access. Hence why I suggested getting an experienced examiner.
Well I think we are all in agreement as only on some other planet are LAs going to recruit a forensic expert on £65,000. (if they did I would be back like a shot) I was given a £500 per year bonus on top of my basic grade and even that put some noses out of joint.
A few points
If any local authority in the UK spends £65K a year on digital forensics they should be sending their computers to me! Seriously, having run an LA lab (and realistically we are talking Trading Standards here) no single authority (or probably regional group) generates enough work to keep a sensibly sized lab going full time. I suspect the plan is (Dude - please correct me if I am wrong) that existing investigators (who will have a case load and other duties) will be doing the digital forensics "on the side" - I believe this is how the telephone operation is run.
Other LA labs have effectively operated as a small business taking work from other authorities on a job by job basis. The result of this has frequently been that those running the labs have been driven half insane (or more) by trying to run a business within a local council department with a huge decision making chain and a complete disconnect between income and spending. Whilst having to get three quotes for something only one person in the world supplies or needing approval in writing two weeks in advance of any overtime may be familiar scenarios to LE examiners but they are not conducive to effecient working especially when you have to show a profit.
The issue here is not at all to do with whether it is better to run an internal lab or outsource. Both are valid with different organisations at different times. The issue is whether it is in any way sensible for an investigation unit which admits to having no background in hard drive forensics to buy a triage tool (or even one of the larger packages) do a one week course and start doing reports. I would have the same issues with, for example, someone who ran a computer shop who posted that he was thinking about providing digital forensics on a business basis using his existing staff (who would at least be able to tell the difference between a SATA power cable and a SATA data cable!).
People who are competent and profecient in digital forensics are usually so because they choose to be in that field and will normally have relevant academic qualifications or years in a similar field of work that indentured them to these levels of competence.
Training your existing team to be good digital forensic examiners without this type of experience could work or could be disastrous.