With technology quickly becoming a vital contributor to business success, CIOs dealing with cloud, big data, social and mobile platforms all face a big challenge—they can’t find top talent fast enough. Job markets are hot and competitive. At the same time, it's hard to find the right skills as new, flexible technologies proliferate. These trends are putting tremendous pressure on IT leadership to deliver value to the business faster than ever.

As organizations continue to adopt technologies that can be scaled to demand and iterated to meet real-time business challenges, findings from our new State of IT Outsourcing Report reveal a greater reliance on a mix of both onshore and offshore outsourced talent. Once just a tourniquet to cut costs, the definition and practice of IT outsourcing has gone beyond "offshoring" and evolved into a strategic tool that reflects today’s rapidly changing business and technology landscape.

By engaging an Elastic Workforce—the mix of onshore and offshore external services providers,contracted experts, and consulting firms—CIOs are empowered with access to the right resources at the right time, and can dedicate the proper skills to the task at hand.

-Bluewolf CEO Michael Kirven

So, WHAT, WHY and HOW are CIOs outsourcing in 2012 and beyond?

We surveyed over 200 CIOs, Directors and IT Managers to address those questions. Our report provides insight into the shifting trends in the way IT organizations are leveraging outsourcing to deliver capabilities to the business, getting access hard-to-find tech talent, and generally doing more with less.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

• 42% of organizations use a mixed sourcing model for application development
• 32% will increase outsourcing investments and 48% will hire more contractors rather than full time staff in the next 12–18 months
• 50% of the IT Outsourcing Budget is allocated to Infrastructure Services for SMBs
• 40% currently spend between 10–25% of their ANNUAL IT BUDGET on IT outsourcing
• 73% outsource Application Services, 62% outsource Infrastructure Services

Read the full report to find out what top companies are doing right.