Outsource DOES NOT MEAN Offshore.
You can outsource to an offshore..but that is NOT what the article was talking about. It was talking of large scale BPO. This occurs in many places and with many functions. Most of these engagements are IT, but there are A/P, Credit, HR, Recruiting (as a subset), Purchasing, Manufacturing and others.
And it is about risk. And for most (certainly not your company), the server farm hosts an external website, erp processing and data storage. Downtime in these of a few minutes to an hour is an inconvenience and not a loss of revenue (customer service and phone sales offer a call back when the system comes back up).