You may have been planning to hire for your IT or cybersecurity department but now that plan is questionable. Meanwhile, your existing IT staff has temporarily stopped other projects in order to get your businesses going 100% remote. 

Decisions need to be made by you, and it needs to be fast. Will frozen projects remain that way, or will you push through? And if hiring is risky today, where else can your IT team turn to for help? 

We believe the answer for many companies is a great MSP.

Co-managed IT with an MSP will get you the specific talent you need to keep pushing forward with your projects while at the same time limiting risk that inherently comes with hiring.

There are three scenarios under which partnering with an MSP might make perfect business sense. Let’s dive into this a bit more.

Limitation in size or experience of your IT department

IT departments may successfully operate under normal day-to-day operations, but now they might find themselves overwhelmed with tickets. Setting up virtual desktops, configuring VPNs for remote workers, the list goes on and on. These are cases where additional qualified man-power would make a difference; having an MSP that can support these new but highly relevant IT demands is crucial.

The key right now for every company is to quickly shift our plans, technologies and even our mindsets about what matters. There are financial repercussions, operational decisions that need to be made; in this sense, agility and flexibility will become your best allies. 

For instance, you can determine to have your IT staff focusing on protecting critical business technologies, like access to data servers, CRM’s or business line processes, and rely on an MSP to support remote work demands like the ones explained before.

Your in-house IT team is overworked

Getting your IT team overworked is a big concern, preparing to go fully remote requires a lot of technology considerations, and some of these are big projects on its own like moving your servers to the cloud. As your team makes quick decisions relying on a partner can offload the pressure to get things done correctly and share the responsibility. 

While a typical knee-jerk reaction may be to hire more staff, this may not be cost-effective or necessary, especially at this time.

Co-managed IT services will allow you to bring resources as needed. For example, at this point, instead of hiring new employees, you might be considering signing contractors that bring value to your business without increasing your costs. Rather than throwing this responsibility to your internal 

IT, you can bring your co-managed IT partner to help with technology onboarding for these new users, from setting up an email to granting access to apps and data. 

Co-managed IT services can also help alleviate the pressure on a busy service desk staff. Let’s face it, not every employee is tech-savvy enough to feel 100% comfortable working from home, and the number of help desk tickets can quickly get out of hand, affecting your overall productivity. Asking your MSP to support this task will help prevent tickets from piling up on the overworked staff and increases the response and problem resolution time.

Your in-house IT team lacks experience with an upcoming initiative

What we are facing right now is an eventuality, and this too will pass, we hope. But it can also be a time to identify some of the weaknesses and challenges your IT staff might have in certain areas. Whether you like it or not, these events will force a change in your business strategy, and as new technologies become available, the opportunities to implement new IT systems and programs will appear. But, existing in-house IT teams may not have the experience needed to successfully plan, implement and/or maintain an upcoming initiative.

Co-managed IT services can provide businesses with a broad range of experience and a deep bench of experts beyond that of the existing in-house staff. The close relation between technology manufactures and MSPs will inevitably allow their engineers to be better prepared and certified, when partnering with them, you’ll benefit from their knowledge and expertise. Additionally, due to working with various clients, MSPs have seen and worked through all kinds of issues, which are valuable learning lessons. These are strengths businesses can tap into with co-managed IT services.

For example, we are currently helping clients migrate their email programs from an Exchange or IMAP/POP environment to Office 365, which enables their employees to access email and productivity tools like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint from the safety of their houses. Because we have done this dozens of times, our experts can efficiently and effectively make this transition for clients without having to distract the in-house team from their typical areas of focus. 

The bottom line, these are no ordinary circumstances, so you need to find an MSP that understands the urgency and can support this business transition. Find a partner who will provide the skills and tools to collaborate seamlessly with your in-house team, the less friction these two have, the better the service they can provide to your employees. As an experienced MSP, we find a great way to reduce friction and increase transparency is to set up dashboards showing the allocation of tickets and resources, the status of open items, and direct communications with the MSP’s team. These dashboards provide businesses with better visibility, more streamlined collaboration, and full transparency.

We are here to help you, let us know if you are currently experiencing an IT need or overworked.