Co-Managed IT Support

Most managed IT pages assume you have nobody and want everything handed over. Plenty of businesses are not in that position. You have somebody. They are good. They are also one person, and one person cannot cover holidays, illness, every specialism, and the after-hours call at the same time.

Co-managed IT is the arrangement where they stay and we fill the gaps around them.

Who it suits

Twenty five to fifty people with one internal IT person. The most common case. They are busy, they are the single point of failure, and hiring a second is not justified yet.
A capable office manager who has absorbed IT. They know where everything is. They should not be the one configuring conditional access at ten at night.
An internal person strong in one area. Excellent with your line-of-business software, less comfortable with networking, security or backup architecture.
A business that wants coverage rather than replacement. Somebody who answers when your person is away, without losing the relationship they have built.

What we typically take

The split is agreed in writing before anything starts, because an unclear boundary is what makes co-managed arrangements fail.

Overflow help desk. The tickets your person does not have time for, at a defined response time
Coverage. Holidays, illness, and after hours, so one calendar stops being a business risk
Security and insurability. Multi-factor, endpoint protection, email authentication, and the insurance questionnaire
Backup and restore testing. Including the quarterly test that nobody internal ever has time for
Patching and device management. The routine that slips when the person is busy
Documentation. Written down properly, which is what protects you if your person leaves
Projects. Migrations, network builds, office moves, where an extra pair of hands is the difference between a weekend and a month

What your person keeps

Usually the things that depend on knowing your business: the line-of-business software, the user relationships, the internal priorities, and the judgement about what matters this week. That knowledge is the reason to keep them, and no outside provider acquires it quickly.

The honest failure mode

Co-managed goes wrong when the boundary is vague and both sides assume the other has it.
The fix is a written split, agreed in week one, and reviewed when things change.
Anybody who sells you co-managed IT without insisting on that is selling you a future argument.

Will you try to replace our IT person?

No, and it is a fair thing to ask directly. A provider whose real plan is to become indispensable and then absorb the role has an obvious incentive to make your internal person look slow.

Our arrangements are month to month with no exit fee, which means we have no lock-in to hide behind and the relationship survives on being useful. If your person grows into handling more, our scope should shrink. That is the arrangement working, not failing.

What it costs

Co-managed is scoped and quoted rather than taken from the standard per-user plan, because the split differs every time. As a reference point, full management runs $125 to $225 per user per month, and a co-managed arrangement usually lands below that because you are buying a subset.

Out of scope and project work is $150 an hour. Everything is published on the pricing section, and the market context is in what managed IT costs in Metro Vancouver.

Where we stop

We are not a staffing agency and we do not place contractors on site full time. If what you actually need is a second internal hire, we will say so. We are also not the right answer if your internal person does not want the arrangement, because co-managed IT built over somebody's objection does not work.

Start with a conversation

The insurance-readiness review works differently here. Rather than reviewing your setup on our own, the most useful version is half an hour with you and your IT person, working out where the gaps actually are. You keep the findings either way.

Request a readiness review