It’s no secret that small businesses have a number of disadvantages when compared to their billion-dollar brethren. And these days you can add offshoring information-technology work to the list of issues that your business must overcome every day.

It might seem like a big challenge — and it is — but it’s also one that can be met if you have the right information and ample motivation.

Over the last 20 years or so, billions of dollars of IT work has been shipped overseas to take advantage of low-cost skill sets in developing countries. IT outsourcing has put India on the global economic map. Eastern Europe, Brazil, Russia and China are all competing for American contracts on everything from software development to application hosting.

But the vast majority of that IT work has been packaged and shipped overseas by large companies. For small companies looking to reap the same cost benefits, offshoring can be a daunting proposition. Small businesses have no procurement specialists. No vendor management team. No in-house legal counsel. So how can a small business interested in offshoring its IT operations succeed? The answer: very carefully.

To get more specifics, I solicited advice from Eugene Goland, founder of the Offshore Outsourcing Best Practices (OOBP) group, an association of small- and medium-sized businesses aiming to educate the small-business community in the art of offshoring.

“This market is underserved,” says Goland. “There are structural difficulties that prevent smaller companies from taking advantage of offshoring, and yet these are the companies that have the most to gain.”

That’s why there are a few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to offshoring IT work:

Don’t be a control freak. Whether your IT infrastructure is in a closet in your home or in a data center in Bangalore doesn’t matter, because when you don’t know how to manage computers and applications, having them close by makes no difference. Offshoring is safe and secure. If major global financial companies are comfortable with this model, why shouldn’t you be?

Find a vendor of appropriate size. This goes for most business relationships, but especially offshore contracts. It’s hard to manage offshore business partnerships between time-zone differences and language and cultural barriers. Make sure that your business is important to your vendor so you get its A-team. To do this, Goland recommends that your business represent no less than 5 percent of the vendor’s total revenue. Anything less than that and you’re likely to be an afterthought.

Stability is a good thing. Technology outsourcing is a volatile market, especially in developing countries. Be sure that your vendor is stable enough to survive some market fluctuations. The last thing you want is for the vendor to vanish six months into a critical software development project. Make sure the firm has been in business for at least five years and has at least 100 employees.

Offshoring experts will tell you that you don’t have to have a big job for the potential savings to make sense. So the option of offshoring is worth exploring for any company. But in many cases it may be only slightly more expensive, or sometimes less expensive, to keep the work close to home. The expenses and inconvenience of managing long-distance relationships often overwhelm the savings. And in some markets, India in particular, the cost of labor has crept steadily upward, eroding much of the benefit.