There could be any number of reasons you are looking to lower the cost of IT spend for your company. IT salaries are rising, so the cost to hire, train, and provide benefits may not be what your small or midsize business can take on now. Maybe you have lost IT staff during the Great Resignation, and you don’t have time to recruit or spend the money to replace those resources quickly. You probably have security initiatives that need to be accomplished, and no one with the experience or time to tackle them. Whatever the reason, you need to supplement your IT department and engage in co-managed IT services.

What are co-managed IT services?

Co-managed IT services refers to a partnership between in-house IT staff and an outsourced managed IT services provider. The collaboration serves to meet the needs of the company using both internal and external resources. Your company assesses the internal resources and responsibilities and outsources other tasks and responsibilities that complement the internal IT staff, as well as help the company reach their business goals.

There are many ways you can engage in co-managed IT services which we won’t focus on in this blog post, however we will discuss how the engagement can lower your IT spend.

Reduce your overhead

The cost of IT staff salaries is rising. Not only that, but it is hard to find the right expertise at the time you need to scale up. Engaging with a company that provides co-managed IT services allows you to keep the resources you have and supplement their responsibilities with services which specifically fill the void you might currently have.

Fixed Monthly Fees

Outsourced IT service providers are accustomed to giving their clients monthly contracts with fixed monthly fees for the co-managed services clients engage in. Many ongoing services can easily be priced this way, so that you know what to expect every month. If you scale up, you know exactly which services you need to add for each employee in your organization. Likewise, if you need to scale-down after seasonal work is complete then services can easily be removed as well.

The enterprise-level tools and resources used by the IT service provider are spread across many clients, so their clients spend less to receive great tools and resources.

Proactive and preventative maintenance saves you money

Co-managed IT services are designed to save you money in the long run through preventative maintenance and proactive planning. By implementing timely upgrades and security updates, as well as monitoring systems, your equipment will perform optimally and experience less downtime.

Planning seems like a luxury to some busy small to midsize businesses who are experiencing accelerated growth. IT service providers work with their clients to hold an annual planning session, build a technology roadmap and budget, as well as conduct quarterly meetings to incorporate any changes throughout the year.

Less money spent on project management

Projects are estimated and quoted separately and can be done so in advance which gives you the opportunity to place the dollars in your budget. IT service providers staff project managers that plan, schedule, and manage resources on their end so that you don’t have to. Their time spent on your project is recorded and then they move on to the next client project.

So, not only are you able to save money by engaging co-managed IT services, there are a number of other benefits you read about above as well. Please reach out to us and let’s talk about what co-managed services you business may need to supplement your in-house IT staff.

Would you like to learn more about what IT services can be outsourced to save your IT manager time? Take a look at this article on our blog.