What's the difference between co-managed and fully managed IT?

Fully managed means we are your IT department. Co-managed means we're a named extension of yours — your internal people plus our bench of engineers. The split is agreed up front and looks different for every team.

Do I keep my own IT staff and tools with co-managed?

Yes — that's the whole point. You keep your IT people, your existing ticket system and Microsoft 365 tenant, your vendor relationships and your roadmap. We back your team up and own a defined slice; we don't migrate you onto our systems or take over the leadership relationship.

When does co-managed IT make the most sense?

Usually when your internal team is stretched — someone's on leave, a project's landed, or security and M365 governance have outgrown the time available. It's a way to add depth and 24/7 cover without losing the in-house knowledge of your business.

What Is Co-Managed IT? Services Explained

Q: What is co-managed IT?

Co-managed IT means we work alongside your existing in-house IT person or team rather than replacing them. We share the same ticket queue and tooling, and take on a deliberate, agreed slice of the work — usually infrastructure, security and vendors — while your team keeps the rest.

“Co-managed” is one of those phrases that means everything to an MSP and nothing to a business owner. Here’s the plain version — what changes when we plug in alongside your in-house IT team, and just as importantly, what stays exactly where it is.

What “co-managed” actually means.

Fully-managed means we are your IT department. Co-managed means we are a deliberate, named extension of yours — your one or two internal people, plus our bench of engineers, sharing the same ticket queue and the same tooling.

The split looks different for every team. For a 70-person law firm with one IT manager, co-managed usually means: they own user support and physical onboarding; we own infrastructure, security, vendors, and security. For a 130-person manufacturer with a three-person team, we tend to flex more on the security side and the M365 governance, and they keep helpdesk in-house.

“We’re not buying back a department. We’re buying back the hour-long meeting we used to have every week about printers.”

— Operations Director, Nottingham law firm

The five things you keep.

Your tooling. We work in your existing ticket system, your existing M365 tenant, your existing devices. We don’t migrate you to ours.
Your IT people. They’re the experts on your business. We back them up; we don’t replace them.
Your relationships. If you’ve got a great existing connectivity vendor, keep them. We’ll manage them on your behalf — or back away entirely.
Your roadmap. Your strategy. Your priorities. Our job is to make them happen faster, not redirect them.
The single number to call. Critically — your team still owns the relationship with leadership. We’re behind it, not in front.

Where it gets practical.

The conversation that usually unlocks co-managed for the first time is the third week of August or the second week of December — when one of your IT people is on leave and the other is buried. That’s the moment to call us, get the four-hour onboarding done, and have us as a documented escalation path for everything that normally pings their phone.

From there, the relationship grows on its own terms. Most of our co-managed clients started with “cover” and ended up with us owning a deliberate slice of the roadmap. None of them stopped having an in-house team.

What it costs.

The pricing model is per-user, monthly, with a defined SOW for the “deliberate slice” we own. We publish minimum pricing on the service page; the actual number is a one-page conversation away, and you keep the report whether you sign or not.

Curious whether co-managed would fit?

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