Making Co-Managed IT Work

By Joshua Oakes, IT Glue

An increasing number of MSPs are finding themselves getting into the co-managed space. The economic rationale is fairly straightforward – the opportunity is growing. Consider this: technology is increasingly complex, good tech talent is hard to find, and businesses are becoming more and more dependent on technology. Put those three trends together and the demand for IT is increasing, and to the point where even larger SMBs – more on the medium end of that – are finding it difficult to handle everything in house. Enter the managed service provider.

So that’s why we’re seeing more MSPs get into co-managed environments. There’s a need in the marketplace for it. But a co-managed scenario is different from a straight managed services scenario. In a more traditional managed services scenario, the MSP does everything. The client doesn’t have anybody who is particularly technical on their team, so the MSP is rightfully wary of letting the client touch anything. This is why we created IT Glue Lite accounts back in the day – to provide information to such clients on a need to know basis but in a way where they can’t actually edit anything.

In a co-managed situation, of course, there’s at least one IT technician working for the client. A basic scenario would be that the client has 1.5 FTEs of tech work, so they hire the one person and then outsource the rest. That can take a lot of different looks, depending on individual client needs and the skill set of the person or people that comprise the client’s IT team.