What are co-managed IT services and why are they important?

Businesses with complex environments or who have intense privacy, compliance, and cybersecurity requirements often contract IT consulting services to share specific workloads.  Businesses who have their own in-house IT staff often take this approach for a variety of valid reasons: IT staff may need to be committed to specific projects and can benefit from having a third party manage infrastructure, they may need expert coverage during vacations or other external commitments, or specific expertise might be needed to maintain operations relevant to cybersecurity, CMMC compliance, etc.  The industry typically uses the term “co-managed” to refer to these work arrangements.

Co-managed IT services have a number of benefits which can make them attractive regardless of your company size.  These include the following:

·         Co-managed environments are monitored 24/7 by the consulting firm…secure monitoring and remote access are crucial in terms of providing performance history and background of the environment’s IT design

·         Having co-management in place reduces time and cost involved in hiring or replacing client IT staff…you instantly have vetted and qualified personnel available to fill in during personnel changes

·         Selecting the right co-management partner gets you personnel with a wider range of experience due to the fact the consulting firm typically deals with a wide variety of environments

·         When the client operational pace is high, tasks can easily be off-loaded to the co-management consulting firm without the need to bring them “up-to-speed”.  This can reduce job burnout for internal staff

·         If a major project comes up there is the alternative to either have client IT staff work on it, assist with it, or have the consultant handle day-to-day IT tasks temporarily.  This flexibility can be extremely attractive

·         The co-management partner will have access to tools and systems which would normally only be available to large enterprises such as threat intelligence, SIEM, and other cybersecurity and compliance systems, credentials management and ticketing/project management systems. Access to these tools can generally be provided to the client

Want to find out more about co-managed IT? Call us at 405-348-1192 and ask to speak to Lane.