Co-managed IT
You have an IT person or a small team. They do not need replacing, they need backup, tooling and somewhere to escalate.
The problem with one internal IT person
They are on call permanently, they cannot take leave without anxiety, they have no peer to check a decision with, and every hour spent resetting passwords is an hour not spent on anything strategic. None of that is a reflection on them. It is a structural problem with the role.
What we take off their plate
- Monitoring and alerting, so nobody is watching dashboards at night.
- Patching, handled on a schedule rather than squeezed between interruptions.
- Escalation, so there is a specialist to call at 2am instead of a search engine.
- Project capacity for migrations, rollouts and network builds that a single person cannot absorb.
- Holiday and sickness cover, so leave is possible.
- Tooling, including monitoring and management platforms that are hard to justify for one seat.
What they keep
The relationships, the institutional knowledge, and the day to day judgement calls that need someone in the building. We are explicitly not trying to displace them, and we will say so to them directly at the start, because the arrangement fails if your IT person thinks we are auditioning for their job.
How the split works in practice
We agree who owns what and write it down. Typically your team handles first-line requests and anything requiring physical presence or business context, and we handle monitoring, security, infrastructure, escalation and projects. Both sides work from the same documentation, so nothing sits in one person's head.
When it makes sense
When you have one to three IT staff, multiple sites or growing complexity, and a nagging awareness that everything depends on one person not resigning.
Questions we get asked
Will our IT person feel threatened?
That depends on how it is introduced, so we introduce it carefully and talk to them directly. In practice most internal IT people welcome losing the pager and gaining someone to escalate to.
Can we start small?
Yes. Monitoring and escalation only is a common starting point, and it is the fastest way to see whether the arrangement suits you.
Who do staff contact?
Whatever you decide, and we document it. Some clients keep all first-line contact internal, others route everything to us and let their internal person work on projects.