Day-to-day operations
Co-Managed IT Services
Co-managed IT adds a full team behind the IT person you already have. Your staff keep the work they know best, and we cover what one or two people can't carry alone.
Signs Your IT Team Needs Co-Managed Support
Your IT person is good, but one person can't be a specialist in everything or on call every night.
If any of these describe your business, this service is usually the right place to start.
- You have one or two internal IT people and no cover when they're out.
- Projects keep slipping because the day job always comes first.
- One person holds knowledge that exists nowhere else in the business.
- A compliance requirement has arrived that nobody internally has handled before.
Benefits of Co-Managed IT
- Your IT person can take a week off without packing a laptop.
- Nights and weekends stop landing on one person's phone.
- Projects move forward while the day-to-day still gets done.
- The specialist job that comes up twice a year doesn't require a new hire.
How Co-Managed IT Works With Your Team
Your internal IT person knows things we never will, like which application the business can't run without and what was tried last time. We add depth around that knowledge, so being one or two people deep stops limiting everything else.
The background work keeps running whether or not anybody is in the building. Monitoring, patching, backup checks and alerting continue through vacations and sick days. Preventive work is the first thing to slip when a team is short-staffed, and it's usually the last thing anybody notices.
Both sides work from one record. That shared documentation keeps two groups of people from making conflicting changes to the same systems, and it means your business no longer depends on one person's memory.
What Our Co-Managed IT Services Include
An agreed split of duties
Written down with your IT person and kept current, so everybody knows who owns what before something breaks.
After-hours and vacation cover
Your team stops being on call in practice as well as on paper. Our after-hours and weekend cover page explains how that works.
Service desk overflow
Your staff reach us when your IT person is buried, at a threshold you set.
Specialist and project work
Migrations, rollouts, security work and the jobs that come up too rarely to justify a hire. See project delivery for internal teams.
Monitoring and patching
The maintenance that has to run every day, backup checks included, in your tools or ours.
Shared documentation
One current record of what you run and how it's configured. Both sides work from it, and you own it.
Setting Up Co-Managed IT, Step by Step
- We agree on the split in writing, with your teamWho owns what gets decided with your IT person in the room. Arrangements go wrong when this step is skipped and the boundary is discovered during an outage.
- We work in your tools, or you use oursMonitoring, patching, documentation and ticket history have to live somewhere both sides can see. If you already have that and it works, we use it. If not, ours becomes the shared tools and documentation, and you keep what's in it.
- We take the load one person can't carryAfter-hours cover, specialist work, project delivery and the background maintenance that has to run whether or not anybody is in.
- We revisit the split as your team changesA split that fit when your IT person started is usually wrong two years later. We review it on a schedule, so a resignation isn't what forces the conversation.
Dividing IT Responsibilities Between Your Team and Ours
The split that works most often gives your team first contact with staff and ownership of the business applications. We take nights and weekends, patching and monitoring, security work and projects.
That's a common starting point, and every arrangement differs. What matters is that the split is decided and written down, because an unclear boundary makes co-managed IT worse than either side working alone. If a CMMC or HIPAA compliance requirement is what's stretching your team, we take that work on too.
When your IT person needs backup describes the situation most co-managed clients start from, and our post on giving your IT person a team behind them covers the arrangement day to day. One manufacturer used co-managed IT to plan for its one-person IT department retiring.
In their words
Co-Managed IT FAQ
How is co-managed IT priced?
It takes one of two shapes, depending on the split. Either per device and per user like a full managed IT agreement, at a lower rate because your team does part of the work, or a block of hours where the need is occasional. The boundary conversation decides which one fits, so we price it after that conversation.
What does our IT person keep?
Whatever they're closest to. That's usually the business applications and the daily judgment calls that need someone who knows the company. They also keep the decisions. We don't overrule your own staff on your own systems, and an arrangement that let us would be the wrong one.
Do we have to use your tools?
Not necessarily. If your team already has monitoring and documentation it's happy with, we work there. If not, ours becomes the shared record. Either way you keep access to what's in it, including if we stop working together, because a record of your own environment should leave with you.
What happens if our IT person leaves?
Much less than it would have otherwise. The documentation exists and we already know the environment, so we can run the day-to-day while you recruit. Plenty of clients start co-managed IT for exactly this reason, after a resignation showed them how much sat in one person's head.
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