Support that works alongside your internal IT team rather than replacing it — tier-1 offload, after-hours cover, specialist depth and holiday backfill.
What co-managed IT means
Co-managed IT is support that sits alongside an internal IT function instead of replacing it. You keep your people. We take the parts of the workload that are either drowning them, outside their specialty, or impossible for one person to cover.
It is a different product from fully managed support, and it fails in a specific way when treated as the same thing: if the boundary between “your team” and “our team” is vague, work falls into the gap and both sides assume the other has it. Which is why the division of responsibility is written down before anything starts.
Who it is for
The one-person IT department. Common in businesses of 40 to 200 staff. It works right up until that person takes leave, gets sick, or resigns — at which point nobody knows the firewall password. Co-management removes the single point of failure.
The team buried in tier-1. An internal team hired to run projects and strategy, spending its week on password resets and printers. Offloading the frontline is usually the highest-return change available.
The team missing a specialty. A capable generalist who is not a network engineer, or a strong infrastructure person with no security depth. Buying that depth as a service is far cheaper than a second hire.
The team without after-hours cover. Someone has to answer at 9pm during an incident. If that is always the same person, they will eventually leave.
The division of responsibility
The most common arrangement:
| Usually ours | Usually yours |
|---|---|
| Tier-1 and tier-2 helpdesk | Line-of-business applications |
| Monitoring and alert triage | Vendor and supplier relationships |
| Patching and endpoint management | Internal projects and roadmap |
| After-hours critical response | Institutional knowledge and process |
| Security tooling and response | Budget and prioritisation |
Every line of that is negotiable, and plenty of clients invert parts of it — keeping the helpdesk in-house because staff like the face they know, and handing us servers, security and infrastructure instead.
What matters is not which split you choose but that it exists in writing. We document it as a RACI at onboarding and review it, because the arrangement that suited you at signing usually needs adjusting a year in.
Access, scoped properly
A recurring failure in co-managed arrangements is the provider taking domain administrator rights across everything because it is simpler than scoping access properly. We provision access to the systems in our scope, at the level required, logged and reviewable. If we are not managing your line-of-business server, we do not need credentials to it.
What it costs
Co-managed support is priced per device on the same basis as fully managed, because the monitoring, patching and platform cost does not change with who answers the phone. Where the scope is genuinely narrower, the plan tier reflects it. The pricing calculator gives you a starting figure, but co-managed scopes vary enough that a conversation will get you a better one.