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What If We Have...

We Have An IT Manager But Still Outsource

Co-managed IT that makes your IT manager better at their job, not nervous about it.

You’ve got someone internal who knows your business properly. You also have an external provider, because no single person covers infrastructure, security, projects, procurement and the helpdesk on a Tuesday afternoon. When that arrangement works, it’s the best of both. When it doesn’t, it’s two parties each assuming the other did the patching. This page is about what makes the difference.

The Problem

Co-managed IT rarely fails on capability. It fails on boundaries.

The symptoms are recognisable. A ticket bounces between internal and external twice before anyone owns it. Something doesn’t get patched because each side assumed it sat with the other. Your IT manager finds out about a recommendation after it’s already been put to the finance director. Documentation lives in two places, neither complete. And when there’s a genuine incident, the first ten minutes go on working out who’s doing what.

There’s a second problem that nobody says out loud. Plenty of external providers treat an internal IT manager as an obstacle: someone to be managed, worked around, or quietly undermined on the way to a bigger contract. Your IT manager knows it, which is usually why they’re cautious about the whole conversation.

You Need Aligned Support, Not Overlap

With clear boundaries, internal and external IT compound. Without them, they cancel each other out and cost you twice.

Why this is a concern:

Unclear ownership creates gaps, and gaps in IT are where risk lives. The thing nobody patched, the account nobody closed, the backup nobody checked because it was on the other party’s list. It also creates friction: duplicated effort, repeated conversations, and an internal person spending their week coordinating a supplier instead of doing their actual job.

And single person dependency is real. If everything your IT manager knows lives in their head, a fortnight in Spain is an inconvenience and a resignation is a problem.

Why it's important:

Done properly, co-managed gives your IT manager three things they can’t get alone: enterprise grade tooling they couldn’t justify licensing for a team of one, specialist depth in security and compliance, and genuine cover so they can be ill, take leave, or concentrate on a project without everything stopping. Your business gets continuity and documentation that isn’t dependent on one person. Nobody loses anything.

Solutions

These are some of the things we do alongside internal IT

Clear Roles, Written Down

We map responsibilities, escalation paths and workflows with your IT manager at the start. Who owns what, who’s called when, what happens out of hours. Agreed before we begin, not discovered during an incident.

Shared Tooling and Visible Documentation

Your IT manager sees what we see: the same monitoring, the same ticket history, the same documentation. No black box, no having to ask us what’s going on in your own estate.

Specialist Depth and Real Cover

Security, compliance, certification and project capacity, plus proper cover for holidays, illness and busy periods. The things one person genuinely cannot do alone, however good they are.

Not sure where the gaps are?

Two minutes, a handful of questions, and an honest read on where internal ends and external should begin. Useful even if you keep your current arrangement.

Your internal IT person should be the most valuable one in the room, not the one fielding password resets at nine on a Monday. Our job is to take the load they shouldn't be carrying and give them tools they can't buy on their own. We've never once tried to work around an internal IT manager, and we'd think less of a provider that did.

Adam Gillett, Head Of Business Partnerships - We Do Your IT Support

Our recommendation where there's an internal IT manager

For most co-managed setups, it's the Essential IT Support Service as the base, with the split scoped alongside your IT manager

Essential gives you the foundation that’s hard for one person to maintain alone: device security, complete cloud and email security, real backup of your Microsoft 365 data, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium. It’s the tooling layer your IT manager would specify themselves if the licensing made sense for a team of one.

What sits on top is a conversation rather than a package. Who runs the helpdesk, who owns projects, who’s called at seven on a Sunday, and where we simply provide capacity. We work that out with your IT manager, in writing, before anything starts.

If certification is in play, Professional. When a customer, tender or insurer asks for Cyber Essentials, Professional includes the tools and the certification support, which is usually the piece an internal team hasn’t had time to get to.

If your internal person has the security side well covered, Starter adds unlimited support and core device protection without duplicating what you already run. Rare, but it happens, and we’d tell you if that’s where you are.

Essential IT Support Service

IT support, device and cloud security, M365, and email signatures — all in one package

The Essential IT Support Service brings together everything most businesses need in a single monthly price. IT support and device security as the foundation, layered with complete cloud and email security, a Microsoft 365 Business Premium licence, and centrally managed email signatures. Reliable IT and real cyber defence, simply bundled.

Key Features

Business Pricing

£86.17 +VAT

Per user, per month (3-year term)

Non-Profit Pricing

£64.32 +VAT

Per user, per month (3-year term)

Every package is unlimited support with no ticket caps and no per-incident charges. Rolling monthly terms are available, longer terms carry a discount, and not-for-profit pricing applies across the range.

The Basics

What makes co-managed IT work, and what makes it fail.

A written split of responsibilities.

Not a conversation everyone remembers differently. Who owns patching, backups, onboarding, procurement, the helpdesk and the out of hours phone, written down and reviewed.

One source of truth for documentation.

Two half-complete records is worse than one imperfect one. Everything in a place your IT manager can see and use.

Shared visibility, both ways.

They should be able to see our tickets, our monitoring and our findings without asking. Transparency is the whole point.

An escalation path agreed in advance.

Including what happens at 6pm on a Friday, and who has authority to make a call when your IT manager isn’t reachable.

Genuine cover, planned.

Holidays, illness, and the possibility that they leave. This is the conversation most businesses avoid and the one that matters most.

A provider who goes through your IT manager, not around them.

If an external provider is briefing your finance director on things your IT manager hasn’t seen, that isn’t partnership, it’s positioning.

How co-managed actually works in practice

This is the part that stops most people, and it’s usually smaller than imagined.

01

A conversation with your IT manager first.

Not with the MD, and not about them. What they want to keep, what they’d happily hand over, what’s been on their list for a year. Their view shapes the scope.

02

We map the split and write it down.

Responsibilities, escalation, out of hours, and who owns which systems. Agreed by both sides before anything changes, and revisited as things evolve.

03

We put the tooling in.

Monitoring, security, patching and backup, configured with your IT manager rather than around them, with full visibility for the internal team.

04

Then we get on with our half.

They focus on the work only an insider can do. We take the load, the specialist pieces and the cover. And we keep talking to them, not past them.

Questions internal IT teams ask us

We’ve compiled the questions we’re asked most often by businesses at this stage. If yours isn’t here, please get in touch.

No, and we’d say the same thing with them in the room. An internal person who knows your business, your systems and your people is not something we can replicate, and we’ve never pitched a client on removing one. If anyone tells you outsourcing lets you cut an internal IT role, be careful: the businesses that do it usually hire someone back within two years.

By starting with them. The first conversation is theirs, the scope is shaped by what they want to keep, and we don’t take recommendations to your leadership that they haven’t seen first. If they’d rather kick the tyres before anyone else gets involved, that’s completely normal and we’re happy to do it that way.

Whatever you decide, written down before we start. We come with a suggested split based on what works, your IT manager adjusts it, and both sides sign up to it. It gets reviewed rather than assumed.

That’s one of the main reasons this model exists. Cover is planned rather than improvised, documentation lives somewhere other than one person’s memory, and if they do move on you’re not starting from zero while you recruit.

 

Yes. Same monitoring, same ticket history, same documentation. If a provider won’t give your internal team visibility into your own estate, ask why.

 

The same security and management stack we run for everyone, which for a single person internal team is usually the biggest practical gain. Licensing that tooling for one seat rarely makes sense; getting it as part of a package does.

 

We don’t work to fixed SLA response times, and that’s deliberate. A service level agreement treats every ticket as a clock: a major outage and a slow printer both get whatever response time somebody wrote into a contract. We work on priority instead. If your issue is urgent, it’s treated as urgent, straight away. If it isn’t, it gets done properly rather than rushed to hit a target.

We’ll say so, to them, with reasons. Then it’s your business and your call. What we won’t do is go round them to find someone who agrees with us.

No. You can take any package on a rolling monthly term. Longer terms carry a discount, 5% at 12 months, 10% at 24 and 20% at 36 on IT support, but that’s your choice, not a condition.

Start with a conversation, ideally with your IT manager in it

We work alongside internal IT teams across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Somerset and Swindon, and remotely across the UK. We’re an NCSC Assured Service Provider, Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 accredited, which means the specialist pieces we take on are ones we’re audited on ourselves.

The first step is a look at where internal ends, where external should begin, and what’s currently falling between the two. No obligation, and your IT manager gets the findings first.

Reassuring Availability

There is nothing more annoying than an IT glitch that stops you working efficiently. However, knowing you have access to immediate attention to the glitch and a solution to it, is very reassuring and that is provided by We Do Your IT. We have so appreciated the availability and response given by the team at We Do Your IT, enabling us to remain a productive firm.

Richard Sharp – Sharp Family Law