Co-Managed IT Support
Extra hands and deeper expertise alongside your in-house IT person — cover for absence, escalation for the specialist work, and knowledge that lives somewhere other than one head.
When the whole IT department is one person
Your IT manager knows the business inside out. They also know the firewall password, the login for the phone system, which cupboard holds the spare switch, and why the finance software falls over at quarter end. Very little of that is written down. So when they take a fortnight in Portugal, anything harder than a password reset waits until they’re back — and if they hand in their notice, you find out how much of your company ran on one person’s memory.
That isn’t a criticism of them. One generalist cannot be current on Microsoft 365 tenant configuration, Windows Server, firewalls, Entra ID conditional access and whatever your industry software does, while also fixing printers and onboarding starters. Co-managed IT support puts a team behind that person instead of replacing them.
It is deliberately different from fully managed IT support, where we take the whole estate off your hands and your staff call us for everything. It is also different from IT consultancy, which is about direction, budget and the three-year plan rather than daily hands on keyboards. Co-managed sits between the two: your person stays in charge of the day job, and we cover the parts that don’t fit into one week or one skill set.
Where we plug in
- Absence cover — holidays, sickness, parental leave and notice periods, so the business doesn’t pause when one person does
- Specialist escalation — Microsoft 365 and Entra ID tenant work, conditional access, mail flow and licensing, the things a generalist meets twice a year and we meet weekly
- Servers and infrastructure — server support, virtualisation, storage and the patching windows nobody enjoys planning
- Security incidents — a second team on the phone when a mailbox is compromised or a device starts behaving oddly at 4pm
- Out-of-hours and weekend project hands — cutovers, migrations and office moves done when the office is empty, without your person working a seventh day
- Helpdesk overflow — we pick up tickets during the weeks a rollout swallows their calendar
- Documentation — a maintained record of the estate: network diagram, credentials in a shared vault, licence inventory, supplier and contract details
- Second-line backup during migrations — someone to sanity-check the plan, then stand alongside on the day it runs
Being clear about who owns what
This is the part that decides whether co-managed works. An internal IT person who thinks an external provider is auditioning for their job will, quite reasonably, keep things close. So we write the split down before anything technical starts: which systems each side owns, which hours each side covers, who the user contacts first, and who signs off a change. The internal person is our main contact, not a party we work around. When we fix something, they get the explanation as well as the fix — the point is that their knowledge grows, not that they become dependent on ours.
Who this suits
Businesses across Streatham, South London, Croydon and Surrey with somewhere between one and four internal IT staff — typically 30 to 200 users. That’s often a professional-services firm with an office manager who inherited IT, a manufacturer with a single systems administrator, a charity with a part-time technician, or a growing agency whose developer keeps getting pulled into laptop problems. It also suits firms with a capable IT lead and a genuine gap in one area: strong on desktops, thin on Microsoft 365 and cloud, or vice versa. If you’re weighing this against handing everything to a provider, our guide comparing in-house and outsourced IT sets out the trade-offs plainly.
How we set it up
- A conversation with your IT person first — before any commercial discussion, so they hear the scope from us rather than from a contract
- Estate walkthrough — we go through the servers, network, tenant, backups and licensing together and record what exists
- The responsibility split, written down — a short document naming systems, hours, escalation routes and approval rules, agreed by both sides
- Access and tooling — monitoring and remote tools deployed where they help, with access levels agreed rather than assumed
- Regular review — a standing catch-up with your IT lead to move work between us as the load shifts
What this usually fixes
- Single points of failure — one person, one set of passwords, no documented handover
- Escalations that stall — a problem outside your person’s experience sitting open for days while they research it
- Project work that never starts — the server refresh or migration that keeps slipping because there’s no capacity for it
- Burnout and turnover — an IT person on call every evening and every holiday eventually leaves
- Gaps at the specialist end — tenant security, firewall rules and identity configuration handled hopefully rather than confidently
- Recruitment pressure — the temptation to hire a second full-time technician for work that only exists two days a week
If you have someone internal and they’re stretched, the fix usually isn’t replacing them. Get in touch and we’ll work out which parts of the load are worth sharing.
Frequently asked questions
Are you here to replace our IT manager?
No. Co-managed work exists because the internal person is worth keeping — they know your business, your people and your quirks in a way no external provider will. We take the load they can't reasonably carry alone — specialist escalations, the nights and weekends, the weeks they're away. If a client later decides to move to full outsourcing that's their call, but it isn't what this service is for, and we say so to the internal team on day one.
How do you decide who handles what?
We agree it in writing before we start. The document names each system, says who owns it, sets the hours each side covers, and states who a user contacts first for each type of issue. It also covers the awkward cases — who can approve a firewall change, who talks to the line-of-business software vendor, what happens at 6pm on a Friday. It gets reviewed as things change rather than filed and forgotten.
What happens if our IT person leaves?
You keep working. Because we document the estate as we go — credentials in a shared vault, network diagram, licence inventory, supplier contacts, the fixes for the recurring faults — the knowledge isn't walking out with them. We can hold the fort while you recruit, help you interview, and hand over properly to whoever arrives.
Do we have to hand over full administrative access?
Not necessarily, and we'd rather earn it than demand it. Some clients give us delegated admin from the start; others begin with read-only visibility and a narrow scope, then widen it once the working relationship settles. What matters is that both sides know exactly what access the other holds, and that it's recorded.
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Feedback from clients of our team, including our sister company PC Macgicians, who deliver much of our engineering work. Names withheld at their request.
Areas we cover
Co-Managed IT Support across South London, Croydon and Surrey — on-site where you need it, remote everywhere.
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