A lot of businesses we speak with already have someone looking after IT. Sometimes it is a dedicated IT manager, sometimes a small team, and sometimes the operations manager who became "the IT person" years ago and never stopped.
When that person gets stretched, the conversation often turns into a choice between keeping them or outsourcing everything. It doesn't have to be either. Co-managed IT is the middle option, and it is how about a third of our clients run.
What co-managed IT actually means
In a co-managed arrangement, your internal IT person stays in charge of what they are best at: knowing the business, owning relationships with staff and suppliers, and setting priorities. A managed service provider takes on the work that benefits from a round-the-clock team and deeper specialists, such as after-hours issues, security alerts, complex problems, holiday cover and project overflow.
The point is not to replace a good internal person. It is to stop them being the only thing standing between your business and an outage.
Signs it might suit you
- One person holds everything. If they are sick, on leave or resign, nobody else knows how things are set up. We have written about key person risk in IT in more detail.
- Security alerts and after-hours calls land on one phone. That person is effectively on call all the time, and it shows.
- Projects keep slipping. Day-to-day support eats the week, so the migration, the new site or the security uplift never gets finished.
- You have outgrown one person but not enough for a second hire. Co-managed support fills the gap without adding another salary.
- Compliance needs specialist skills. Essential Eight, ISO 27001 or DISP work asks for experience that a generalist shouldn't have to build alone.
It suits you less if you have no internal IT at all, where fully managed support is simpler, or if you already have a large team with its own around-the-clock coverage, where a narrower specialist engagement may fit better.
Splitting the work
The arrangements that work best write the split down. A typical starting point looks like this, adjusted for your business:
- Your IT person: staff relationships, onboarding and offboarding decisions, line-of-business applications, supplier relationships and IT priorities.
- The provider: monitoring and alert response, patching, endpoint security, backups, after-hours support, escalation of complex problems, holiday cover and project overflow.
- Shared: documentation, change approval and regular access reviews.
None of that is fixed. The right split depends on your IT person's strengths and how much of their time you want back.
What makes it work
From the service side, these are the things I look for in a co-managed setup that is going to last:
One view of the work
Tickets should live somewhere both sides can see them. If your IT person tracks requests in their inbox and the provider tracks them in its system, things fall between the two.
An escalation path in both directions
Your IT person should know exactly how to hand something to the provider and how quickly it will be picked up. The provider should know when to bring your IT person in, because some calls are theirs to make.
Documentation both sides can edit
Network diagrams, licence registers and how-to notes should be shared, current and owned by the business. If only one side can update them, they go stale quickly.
Named admin accounts, never shared ones
Everyone with administrator access gets their own account with multi-factor authentication. No shared admin passwords, and no generic logins nobody can trace. It is basic security, and it means you always know who changed what.
Agreed change control
Decide who approves changes to production systems, and keep a record. Most co-managed problems I've seen start with a change one side made without telling the other.
A regular service review
A monthly catch-up between your IT lead and the provider's account team keeps the split honest. What came up, what is outstanding, what should move from one side to the other.
Where it goes wrong
The common failures are predictable. Ownership blurs and both sides assume the other one has it. A provider treats the internal person as an obstacle and tries to work around them. Two sets of monitoring and management tools run side by side and nobody trusts either. Each of these is avoidable if the split, the tools and the communication are agreed at the start rather than worked out during an incident.
Covering leave and longer gaps
Co-managed support also helps when your IT person is away for a longer stretch, such as parental leave, long service leave or extended sick leave. We can place an engineer on site from one to five days a week, from four-week leave cover through to embedded engagements of three years or more, so staff get the support they're used to and your IT person comes back to a system they still recognise.
What it costs
Co-managed agreements are scoped to the work the provider takes on, so they are priced differently from fully managed support. How after-hours work is handled is set out in the agreement to match how much of it you need. The important thing is that the scope is written down before you sign, so both sides know what the fee covers.
Keep your IT person, and stop them being a single point of failure.
Co-managed IT lets your internal IT lead focus on the business while a provider covers after-hours, security, specialist problems, leave and project overflow. Write the split down, share one view of the work, use named admin accounts and review it monthly, and it works well for both sides.
If your IT person is stretched, or you'd like to see how a co-managed split would look for your business, our managed services team can walk you through it, or you can book a discovery call.