Co-Managed vs Fully Outsourced IT

• Fully outsourced: help desk, endpoint management, patching, security tooling, backup, network, vendor coordination and strategy all sit with the provider
• Co-managed: internal staff keep user relationships and line-of-business applications; the provider takes monitoring, security, infrastructure, escalation and projects
• Both models need a written responsibility matrix — the failure mode in co-managed is always an unassigned task, not a technical gap

Comparing a monthly invoice to a salary understates the internal cost. One internal generalist carries no redundancy for vacation, illness or 2am, and cannot be simultaneously expert in help desk, networking, identity, security and ERP.

Co-managed is rarely cheaper than one hire; it is cheaper than the three or four hires it would take to cover the same surface area with the same depth. Fully outsourced is usually cheaper than any internal team at small headcounts because the cost of tooling and 24/7 coverage is shared.

• Line-of-business or ERP systems need daily attention from someone who understands your operations
• Multiple sites or a plant floor where physical presence matters
• Compliance obligations that require an internal owner
• Project volume high enough that support and projects compete for the same hours

• Tickets bounce between internal staff and the provider with no owner
• Two monitoring or patching tools both claim the same endpoints
• Security alerts arrive with no agreement on who triages them
• Nobody can name the current RTO for the most important system

Start from systems, not job titles. List every system, then assign monitoring, patching, escalation, change approval and documentation ownership per system. Anything unassigned becomes an outage eventually.

Then fix the interfaces: one ticket queue of record, one identity provider, one endpoint management platform, one backup verification report both sides read.