For businesses that already have an IT person

Keep your IT person. Lose the 2am call.

Co-managed IT means you keep your internal IT person and we work alongside them, instead of taking the whole function over. In the arrangement we recommend most often, they keep the desktops, the people and the help desk, and we take the servers, the network, the backups and the security — and they get the same tools our own engineers use to do their half with.

Talk through where the line would sit

Thirty minutes with a senior engineer, no hard sell — and we are happy for your IT person to be on the call. Honestly, we would prefer it.

One person cannot be the whole IT department

This is not a criticism of anyone's IT person. It is arithmetic. A single internal IT person covers about forty hours of a week that has one hundred and sixty-eight in it, and the hours they are not covering are the ones attackers and hardware failures prefer.

  • The phone never really goes off

    A server does not care that it is Saturday. When one person is the escalation path, they are the escalation path at 2am, on annual leave, and at their kid's assembly. That is not a staffing gap you can fix by trying harder.

  • Leave is something other departments take

    Most internal IT people we meet have leave accrued that they cannot spend, because nobody else knows the environment well enough to cover a fortnight. The business carries that as a risk whether or not anyone has named it.

  • Security moved faster than one person can

    Application control, conditional access, patch deadlines, phishing-resistant MFA, log retention, tested restores. Keeping all eight Essential Eight controls current is a full job on its own, and it is nobody's favourite part of the week.

Where the line usually sits

There are several ways to divide this up, but one of them accounts for most of the arrangements that work. Your IT person keeps the half that rewards knowing the business. We take the half that runs at three in the morning.

The split we recommend most often. It is agreed in writing before we start, and anything outside it is quoted rather than assumed.
Your IT person keepsWe take on
The help desk, and the relationships behind itServers, virtualisation and the infrastructure under them
Workstations, laptops and how they are set upThe network, firewalls and Wi-Fi
The line-of-business applications they know bestBackup, replication and rehearsed restores
Their own admin rights and their own keysThe Essential Eight controls, run and evidenced
Knowing which person needs what, and why24/7 monitoring, and the 2am call that is no longer theirs

If that division is the wrong way round for you — some businesses have an internal person who is strongest on infrastructure and would rather hand over the end users — we will set it up the other way. The point is that the line is explicit and written down, not that it sits in one particular place.

Your IT person gets our tools, not a cut-down version

This is the part that makes co-managed worth doing rather than just cheaper. The monitoring, documentation, ticketing and patching platforms we run cost more than a single-site business can justify on its own. In a co-managed arrangement your IT person works inside them with us.

  • The monitoring we watch, they watch

    Not a cut-down client view. The same dashboards our engineers use, with their own logins, so they can see a disk filling up before a user rings them about it.

  • Documentation that already exists

    Every environment we take on gets documented properly, and your IT person gets the same access to it that we have. The tribal knowledge stops living in one head — which protects them as much as it protects you.

  • Ticketing they can see into, and escalate through

    They raise a ticket the way our own engineers do, and they can see what happened to it. Work outside the agreed split is quoted before it starts, not discovered on an invoice.

  • End-user security training off their plate

    Phishing simulations and awareness training run on a schedule, with the reporting done. It is a job most internal IT people are glad to hand over, because chasing colleagues about it costs them goodwill they need for other things.

The security half of the split is the Australian Government's Essential Eight, run and evidenced the same way we run it for businesses with no internal IT at all. It is the part most likely to slip when one person is carrying everything, and the part a tender or an insurer will ask you to prove.

What this is not

Co-managed arrangements fail for predictable reasons, and most of them come down to someone not saying what they actually wanted at the start. So:

  • It is not a trial separation. If you want to outsource IT completely, say so and we will quote that instead — honestly, it is a simpler arrangement for everyone.
  • We will not be asked to assess your IT person's performance. We will tell you plainly whether a configuration is sound; that is a different question from whether someone is good at their job, and we do not confuse the two.
  • Your IT person is not losing their admin rights, their keys or their access to their own environment.

Both sides of this want the same thing, which is why it works when it is set up honestly: reliable, secure IT at a cost the business can predict. Your IT person wants that too. They are just outnumbered by the hours.

Book a free consultation

Frequently asked questions

Co-managed IT is an arrangement where a business keeps its internal IT person or team and brings in a provider to work alongside them, rather than handing the whole function over. The in-house team keeps day-to-day closeness to the business while the provider carries infrastructure, security, escalation and after-hours cover. Otaris provides co-managed IT for Adelaide businesses, with the internal team keeping its own access and working in the same monitoring, patching and documentation tools our engineers use.

The most common split, and the one we recommend, is that your IT person keeps workstations, end users and the help desk, and we take the servers, the network, backup and the Essential Eight security controls. It is the configuration that plays to what an internal person is genuinely better at — knowing the people and the applications — and takes off them the parts that do not care what time it is. The line is written down before we start, and work outside it is quoted rather than assumed.

No, and we will not take the work on that basis. If a business wants to move to fully outsourced IT, that is a legitimate thing to want and we will quote it openly — but it is a different arrangement, and dressing it up as co-managed would mislead the person whose job it is. Co-managed only works when the internal IT person actually wants it, so we ask them directly before anything is signed.

We cover the parts of the environment we already run, and we already know the setup because we have been in it every day rather than reading documentation for the first time in an emergency. For the parts your IT person keeps, we agree the cover arrangement before they go, so a fortnight away does not become a fortnight of deferred work waiting for them.

It depends on the split — specifically on how much of the environment stays in-house — so we quote it rather than publish a single rate. What we can tell you up front is that the quote is itemised against the line we agree, so you can see what you are paying us for and what your own team is still covering. Call 1800 456 567 and we will walk through where the line would sit for your business and what that costs.

Yes. In the split we recommend, the Essential Eight controls are ours to run and to evidence — application control, patching, macro settings, application hardening, admin privilege restriction, operating system patching, multi-factor authentication and tested backups. That matters because the Essential Eight is the part most likely to slip when one person is carrying everything, and it is the part an insurer or a tender will ask you to prove.

A second set of hands, not a replacement.

Tell us what your IT person is carrying on their own at the moment, and we'll talk through where the line would sit. Thirty minutes with a senior engineer, no hard sell — and bring them along.

  • Where the split would sit for your environment
  • What we would take on, in writing, before anything starts
  • An honest answer on cost, including if co-managed is the wrong shape for you

Prefer to talk?

Call 1800 456 567

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