Service
Co-managed IT
For businesses that already have someone internal and do not want to lose them. This is a different arrangement rather than a smaller version of fully managed: they keep the relationships and the business context, we supply the coverage, the tooling and the escalation path one person cannot provide alone.
The gap this closes
128
hours a week one person cannot cover
Before annual leave, illness, and the fact that two things sometimes break at once.
Who does what
This matrix is agreed before anything starts and reviewed quarterly. It exists because the failure mode in co-managed arrangements is not conflict, it is a task both sides assumed the other one owned.
| Responsibility | Owner |
|---|---|
| User support and requestsThey know the people and the context | Internal |
| After hours and weekend coverageOne person cannot cover 168 hours | Provider |
| Monitoring and alertingTooling one person cannot justify alone | Provider |
| Security stack and responseSpecialist depth and 24 by 7 review | Provider |
| Vendor and business relationshipsInstitutional knowledge stays in the building | Internal |
| Patching and maintenanceAutomated by provider, exceptions handled internally | Shared |
| Projects and migrationsProvider supplies capacity, internal supplies context | Shared |
| DocumentationMaintained centrally so it survives staff changes | Provider |
| Holiday and sickness coverThe reason many businesses call in the first place | Provider |
Five signs you need this
- Your IT person has not taken a full week of leave without their laptop in years
- Projects keep slipping because day to day support consumes the whole week
- Nobody covers evenings, weekends or the two weeks they are away
- Security tooling is thinner than it should be because the licences do not make sense for one seat
- There is exactly one person who understands the firewall
The first one is the strongest signal. An IT person who cannot take leave without their laptop is not a dedicated employee, they are an unmitigated business risk with a good attitude about it.
What your internal person actually gets
The tooling is the obvious part: monitoring, endpoint detection, patch management and backup platforms that cost the same whether they cover one business or fifty, which is why a single internal seat rarely justifies them.
The less obvious part is the escalation path. Every internal IT person eventually meets a problem outside their experience, and without somewhere to escalate that becomes a long evening with a search engine. Having specialists to hand changes what one person can take on.
And they get to go on holiday. It sounds minor. It is usually the reason the conversation started.
Common questions
Answered before you ask.
Will our IT person feel replaced?
That depends entirely on how it is introduced, and it is worth getting right. In a well run co-managed arrangement their job improves: the recurring low value work moves out, the tooling gets better, and they finally get to do the projects that have been waiting two years. Where it goes wrong is when the arrangement is really a redundancy decision that nobody has said out loud, because an internal person who suspects they are training their replacement will not hand anything over. If that is the actual plan, it is better to be honest internally before we arrive.
How do you avoid both sides assuming the other did it?
A written responsibility matrix, agreed before anything starts and reviewed quarterly. The failure mode in co-managed arrangements is almost never conflict, it is a gap: a patch cycle, a backup check or an alert that both parties believed the other one owned. Every recurring task has a single named owner, and anything genuinely shared has a named lead.
Is co-managed cheaper than fully outsourced?
The monthly fee is lower because the scope is narrower, but you are also still carrying a salary. Total cost is usually higher than pure outsourcing and lower than trying to build a full internal team. The reason to choose it is rarely cost. It is that you want institutional knowledge to stay in the building while removing the single point of failure and the coverage gap.
Can we start co-managed and change later?
In both directions, and it happens regularly. Businesses move to fully managed when their internal person leaves and they choose not to backfill, and they move from fully managed to co-managed when they grow enough to justify a hire. Because the documentation and tooling are already in place, the transition either way is far less disruptive than the original onboarding.
Related
What sits alongside this.
IT support and help desk
Tiered support with published response targets, remote and onsite.
Cybersecurity services
Endpoint detection, email security, monitoring and user training.
IT consulting and vCIO
Budgets, roadmaps, procurement and quarterly reviews.
In-house, outsourced or co-managed
The fully loaded cost of one internal hire against a contract.
What is included in managed IT services
A line by line scope, including the exclusions most contracts hide.
Bring your IT person to the call.
Co-managed arrangements work when the internal person is part of designing them. We would rather they were in the room from the start.