Co-Managed IT – Making IT Director’s Lives Easier
When you are an IT director, it can be quite a challenge.
This is especially true for startups or businesses that are quite small.
You have yourself, a couple of other friends, and your devices to worry about. Worst case scenario is that you might have to do some maintenance stuff on your devices, and that’s just about it.
But once you scale. Once you see more devices being added to the network with more information and data going through your system. It becomes a total nightmare. All of a sudden, you have this behemoth of a responsibility that you can’t handle.
So what do you do?
Of course, you can put up an ad looking for a couple of people who can help you tame the monster that is IT. But that in itself is a problem. Hiring can be a real toss-up sometimes, and it can take months and a couple of failed hirings before you can find the right guy/gal who can help you make a difference.
So you go to the next best option.
Co-managed IT.
What’s co-managed IT? That’s what we are here to talk about.
Let’s find out how co-managed IT can help businesses take on large IT challenges without having to go through the troubles of hiring people or outsourcing everything to a 3rd-party provider.
What is Co-Managed IT
Whenever people talk about IT management, they automatically think that businesses have only two choices: get an internal IT team or hire an external team to handle all their IT needs.
Now, both options have their pros and cons. But what if you take the best of both options and put it into one without having to deal with all of the negatives?
That’s co-managed IT.
Co-managed IT is having an internal IT team (or an IT Director) while outsourcing the majority of the IT grunt work to an external team. With an internal IT Director, the business owner has a person she/he knows who understands the business, the strategy, and it’s long-term and short-term goals. On the IT Director’s side, he has access to a team of seasoned professionals who know what they are doing and with existing SOPs. It’s a strategic partnership that takes the best of both worlds while covering up the shortcomings of each option.
But how exactly does a business benefit from a co-managed IT set up and is it a good way to go as a business?
Benefits of a Co-Managed IT Setup With an IT Director
- Flexibility – IT work can be pretty erratic. One day you’ll have one person asking about a warning bubble on his/her PC, and there are days when the whole network is down, and you don’t know what’s wrong. With co-managed IT, your IT team composed of the IT Director and 3rd-party managed IT team can easily attend to a small problem or a large issue. You don’t need to call for backup as the 3rd-party IT team has enough workforce to fill in roles as needed. Need more people staffing the help desk due to the implementation of new software? The IT Director can say the word, and you’ll have 3 or more new people answering tickets in no time.
- Control – One of the main concerns of getting a fully managed IT team is that the businesses feel like they don’t control their IT department. This certainly has its merits, especially when business owners know very little about IT. All they hear about is a lot of tech jargon, which they may not fully grasp. With co-managed IT, you have a liaison in the form of your IT team or IT Director who can “translate” everything for you. With an IT Director in your team, you have some semblance of control of what’s going on and what the plan is going forward.
- Lower costs – While it is certainly cheaper to get a fully managed IT service, co-managed IT still beats hiring a full IT team to handle all your IT needs. Some businesses take this a step higher by hiring only an IT director to serve as a middleman between the business and the 3rd party IT team.
- 24/7 Support – Issues can arise at any time, and an IT Director surely can’t be there to fix them or provide solutions all the time. However, a 3rd-party managed IT team can easily set up a 24/7 help desk that can answer any concern your workers might have. This same team can also provide round-the-clock monitoring of your network for security purposes.
- Robust security – While your IT Director can be a whiz when it comes to IT, he’s no Mr. Manhattan who can watch over your system at all times. This is where the 3rd-party IT team comes in. They have the tools, tech, and expertise to put up proper defenses and provide proactive measures to secure your network and devices. Your in-house IT team or IT Director can then provide another security layer to augment the one put in place by the 3rd-party IT team.
- Expertise – When working with certain software, it’s hard to find the right IT people to help you use it properly. You can hire great prospects, but that also means you have to train them from the ground up. With a co-managed IT setup, you get a pool of experts with the expertise and experience who can help your business right off the bat without having to worry about training.
A co-managed IT setup is a good compromise for businesses who want control in their IT department but don’t want to let it eat their budget.
If you have an IT Director in your team or a whole IT department that gets overwhelmed with work now and then, you can give Atlantic IT a call. We can talk over how a Co-Managed IT setup can help your business reach its maximum potential. Atlantic IT is a trusted name in Managed IT Services for large to emerging companies in New York, Atlanta, North Carolina, Ohio, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Let our team of seasoned IT service engineers and IT specialists handle your IT concerns so your IT Director can focus on what’s important for your business.
