With the advent of globalisation and fierce competition, outsourcing is considered as a smart management technique and a strategic initiative, which enables organisations to achieve competitive advantage in today’s market. Accordingly, most of the organisations from both private and public sectors have tended to outsource at least one of their services to outside service providers. Over the years, a number of researchers have discussed themes of outsourcing in different perspectives, and the aim of this paper is to synthesize the existing literature in order to provide a clearer picture of the outsourcing concept. Though outsourcing has been written extensively, as the researchers highlighted, most of the previous studies have focused on two key questions: ‘‘should we outsource?’’ and ‘‘what to outsource?’’. Therefore, this paper goes beyond what is often addressed in literature and discusses different definitions of outsourcing, the notions identified through those definitions, different forms of outsourcing, motives as well as the outsourcing process. While outsourcing involves two major parties, i.e. the Client; who obtains a specific product, service or a process and the Service Provider; who provides the said product, service or process, this paper discusses the above key themes from the Client’s point of view.