What framework or approach do you use to help you decide when to build vs. buy?

I find it best to drive this decision through organizational strategy and competences within the business and IT.

For instance:

- What tier is the business and BCP group defining this initiative/solution will fall under. This will provide context when reviewing vendors capabilities against your own.

- What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) expected for this product?

- Do you have the in house competences to support developing your own solution?

- Is your IT strategy Cloud first? SaaS first etc.?

- What is the business urgency?

- What is the budget?

- Does this need to be resilient and/or scalable? Goes along with Tier and RTO/RPO discussion.

I would have more if I think on it more, but this is some of the core things I am looking at when reviewing a solution. We actually took these types of criteria and ranked the priority and assigned a weight to each item. Then rank SaaS, IaaS, On-Prem etc to see what would win out.

This is not the end all on the decision, but can provide a level of objectivity to the review.