When it comes to choosing the ideal IT management solution for organizations, business owners and decision-makers tend to fall into the trap of limiting the available options to either in-house or outsourced IT. Co-management with an MSP is a viable solution that tends to be overlooked, and as such will be the focus of the rest of this article.
What is co-managed IT?
Co-managed IT represents an arrangement where a company’s IT personnel works hand-in-hand with a managed IT service provider, in any one of the ways listed below:
Single Internal Resource
In this instance, the organization bestows the sole responsibility for all IT infrastructure on a single member of staff. This member of staff may assume the CIO title, taking responsibility for several roles. Their main role would be to help shape the company’s IT landscape while employing the services of an MSP for hands-on tasks such as project implementation, system monitoring and troubleshooting. This arrangement relieves a likely highly paid individual from the time-consuming, non-strategic tasks better suited to a junior-level member of staff.
MSP Monitoring and Maintenance
Small and medium-sized businesses may often employ teams of IT personnel with expertise in specific areas: programming, IT architecture, etc. While these teams may excel within their areas of expertise, there might be a need for help with additional necessary tasks such as troubleshooting or machine monitoring which fall outside of the teams’ areas of expertise.
In these cases, an MSP could be employed to deal with these monitoring and maintenance tasks, leaving the core internal team to focus on project-based tasks. As with the case of the CIO, this saves higher-paid internal personnel from getting bogged down with time-consuming day-to-day operational tasks.
Project-Based Management
The project-based approach is the opposite of the approach mentioned above. In this model, organizations (schools, non-profits, for example) rely on a core internal team for small tasks such as troubleshooting, but employ the services of an MSP for larger projects – cloud migrations, major overhauls or complex tasks beyond the capacity of the internal team.
Overflow
Whether you have a teammember going on vacation, or out for sickleave co-managed IT allows your IT staff to actually have timeoff. You can also spin up extra hands onsite when there are IT emergencies or when you just need a little extra help to get caught up on your workload.
Consulting
Small businesses that keep a core IT team to manage day-to-day operations might choose to employ an external team to offer fresh insight into identifying weaknesses or generating new ideas. Acting within a consulting role, an MSP can supply a team of experts with advice on upcoming trends, routine assessments or even employee training.
Consulting is also key when dealing with compliance requirements. An MSP like Solzorro can conduct independent compliance checks to identify potential loopholes where organizations may fall short of external compliance audits.
While the above examples offer situational insights into different organizational IT structures, the possibilities for IT co-management are only limited to the imagination of the MSP partner and the business needs. In summary, IT co-management options provide a viable organizational strategy for optimizing the efficiency of core IT personnel, allowing them to focus on tasks appropriate for their skill sets.
