Co-Managed IT: How It Works When You Have In-House IT

There is a particular kind of company where IT is both fine and quietly fragile. Someone internal handles it, knows the systems inside out, and gets things done. Then that person takes two weeks off, a server misbehaves on the Tuesday, and everyone discovers how much rested on one pair of hands.

Co-managed IT is the arrangement that fixes this without replacing anyone. Your internal person stays, keeps ownership of what they do well, and gets a team behind them for everything else.

The problem with a team of one

An internal IT person is genuinely valuable. They know your business, your quirks, the application that finance refuses to give up. They are on site when a laptop dies. None of that is easy to buy externally.

What one person cannot do is cover everything. Not through any failing, just arithmetic.

• They cannot be awake at all times. Evenings, weekends and holidays are gaps by definition.
• They cannot specialise in everything. Networking, Microsoft 365, security, telephony and backup are separate disciplines now.
• They get pulled into the urgent. Password resets and printer problems fill a day, and the improvement work never starts.
• They have nobody to consult. Every judgement call is made alone, which is stressful in a way that shows up as turnover.

The usual response is to hire a second person, which is expensive and only widens the coverage slightly. Two people still cannot cover nights, weekends and five specialisms between them. Co-managed IT is the alternative that scales better.

How co-managed IT is divided in practice

There is no single formula, but the split usually falls along the same lines.

Your person keeps the things that benefit from being close to the business: user support, the applications specific to your industry, small projects, relationships with the people who work there, and knowing why things are the way they are.

The external team takes the things that benefit from scale: monitoring, patching, backup verification, security tooling, out-of-hours cover, and the specialist work that comes up twice a year.

Both share planning, documentation and larger projects, where one side brings context and the other brings experience of having done it fifty times.

The important part is writing it down. Ambiguity is what makes these arrangements fail, because both sides assume the other is watching the backups.

Why internal IT people usually welcome it

Managers sometimes worry that this feels like a vote of no confidence. In practice the reaction is more often relief, provided it is introduced honestly.

Being the only person who can fix anything sounds like job security and feels like a leash. It means answering the phone on holiday and never being able to be ill without guilt. A good co-managed IT setup gives that person time off that is actually time off, someone to think out loud with, and access to specialists who have solved the problem before.

It also gets them out of the ticket queue often enough to do work that matters, which is usually why they took the job.

The way to get this wrong is to arrange it behind their back. Involve them from the first conversation, let them shape the division of work, and the arrangement tends to stick.

When it makes sense, and when it does not

Co-managed IT fits companies with one or two internal people, a growing environment, and a gap they can name. Twenty-four hour cover, security expertise, or simply someone to hold the fort in August.

It is less useful in two situations. If you have nobody internal at all, fully managed services is simpler. And if your internal team is already four or five people with real specialisation, you probably need project support rather than an ongoing shared arrangement.

Making it work

Three things separate the arrangements that last from the ones that quietly sour.

One ticket system. Two queues means work falling between them and nobody able to see the whole picture.

Shared documentation. Both sides read and update the same environment record. This is also what protects you if either side changes personnel.

A regular conversation. Monthly is enough. What broke, what is coming, what should we improve. Without it the external side becomes a supplier rather than a colleague.

Let us fill the gaps around your team

At EvolvingDesk we do a lot of this, and the starting point is always the same conversation with your internal person rather than about them. What do you want to keep? Where do you get stuck? What wakes you up at night?

From there we take the load that scales badly for one individual: monitoring, patching, backup checks, security, and cover outside office hours. Your person keeps the work they are best placed to do, with a team of specialists a message away when something unusual appears.

Your business stops depending on one person’s holiday schedule, and that person stops carrying it alone.

One internal IT person carrying everything? Plan a call and bring them along. The conversation works better with all three of us in it.

Read more

• What is a managed service provider
• How much does IT management cost per employee, per month
• The 3-2-1 backup rule explained

Further reading: the NCSC board toolkit on managing cyber risk and the Wikipedia overview of managed services.