What is co-managed IT — and when does an in-house IT manager need it?

Plenty of schools and mid-sized businesses have one IT person. Sometimes two. They are usually excellent, usually overloaded, and usually the single point of failure for the entire organisation.

Co-managed IT is the arrangement where an external partner works alongside that person rather than instead of them.

The three gaps it fills

1. Cover

Your IT manager takes annual leave. They get flu. They eventually leave for another job. In a single-person IT team, each of those is an organisational risk, and everybody knows it — not least the IT manager, who has probably not taken a proper fortnight off in years.

2. Depth

No single person is simultaneously an expert in firewalls, Microsoft 365 tenancy migration, structured cabling, VoIP, safeguarding filtering and interactive display procurement. A good generalist knows what they do not know. Co-managed support gives them specialists to call on for the jobs that come round once every five years.

3. Scale

A rollout of 200 laptops, an office move, a server replacement or a whole-site cabling job is not a one-person task. It is not that your IT manager cannot do it; it is that while they do, nothing else gets done.

What it looks like in practice

Every arrangement is different, which is the point, but typically we provide some combination of:

• Second- and third-line escalation, so your IT manager has somewhere to go with the hard ones
• Helpdesk and remote support overflow at busy times — the start of term, month end
• Holiday and sickness cover
• 24/7 monitoring so nobody is checking event logs at 11pm
• Project delivery, with our engineers doing the heavy lifting
• An account manager and a five-year plan to bring to the leadership team

The objection, addressed

In-house IT managers are sometimes wary, and understandably: this can look like the first step towards outsourcing them. Done properly, it is the opposite. It removes the parts of the job that are grinding them down — the 7am phone calls, the holidays that are not really holidays — and gives them time for the work that actually needs someone who knows the organisation.

The IT managers we work with tend to become the arrangement’s biggest advocates, which is usually the tell.

More on co-managed IT, or see how we work with multi-academy trusts.