IT leaders seek outside assistance for a variety of reasons. Keeping a handle on new systems, facing cybersecurity challenges, new industry regulations, hardware replacements—all of those can be too much for a single IT leader or small team to handle on their own.

Controlling costs is a motivation that many senior IT leaders fail to consider. By blending the capabilities of your internal team with outside expertise, co-managed IT solutions can help you gain deep control over your network, while also saving money in the process.

Let’s look at why that is, and how to choose a co-managed provider that makes a difference.

Co-Managed IT Minimizes Network and Business Downtime

You’ve got the IT skills, experience, and in-depth knowledge of your existing technology to drive the overall strategy of your organization.

What you really need is specialized help or more hands-on deck when your in-house team gets overwhelmed.

A major benefit of partnering with a qualified co-managed IT provider is that they can offer targeted support around your most stubborn pain points. Typically, that breaks down to a few key areas.

• Help desk support
  Hiring and managing IT help desk staff takes time. Midsized businesses can often gain instant cost savings by outsourcing help desk support to an external provider who has the people, processes, and technology to slide into that role and provide immediate efficiency gains. This saves money while simplifying your life.
• Digital transformation initiatives
  Cloud migrations, mobile device management, securing remote access and work from home systems, and several other popular projects that fit under the umbrella of “digital transformation” all have the potential to overwhelm you or your senior IT staff.
• Network patching and maintenance
  You know that IT-related downtime is a major drain on your organization, which is why you work so hard to avoid it. The average cost of downtime is rising. More than 60% of downtime events cost over $100,000, which is a 39% increase over just three years ago.If your IT team is completely in-house, you’ll struggle to address issues that happen after hours or when key staff are on vacation, which just prolongs the downtime event. Co-managed services from a trusted provider eliminate this issue, so you’ll enjoy maximized uptime and availability.

Close Skill Gaps and Reduce HR-Related Issues

Skill gaps can make it harder to grow your business, and overworked teams are often unsustainable. A chronic IT skill shortage affects businesses across the United States, so it’s not surprise that businesses in Ohio would be dealing with similar issues.

Here are some recent salary estimates for IT jobs in Ohio from ZipRecruiter:

Cybersecurity engineer: $114,250/year
Help desk technician: $40,400/year
Network engineer: $65,000/year

Strategically partnering with a co-managed solutions provider who understands your industry and business helps you avoid all the hassles with hiring specialized skillsets, get instant access to the skills you need, and stop worrying about IT hiring for good.

Navigate a Rough Economy with Certainty

In times of economic uncertainty, as we’re experiencing in late 2024, why add new people to your payroll when you only need periodic expertise? It can be great to have your IT team down the hall, but as you well know, the costs of paying a full-time employee go far beyond base salary, often making a new hire untenable.

The hiring process alone is a huge cost when you consider job advertisements, recruiting, and interviewing. In many cases, the cost of hiring a new employee can be three or more times the base salary of the role. Co-managed IT providers can help with highly specialized support, such as HIPAA-compliant IT solutions, so you don’t need to have these specialists on your payroll.

Avoid Burnout and Employee Attrition

Stressed-out employees are more likely to jump ship; we all know that. If you’re asking your IT staff to do more than they can reasonably handle, or wear hats outside of their core competencies, then you’re risking key staff jumping ship to a less stressful position.

Working with a managed IT services provider helps you avoid the expenses associated with staff turnover, provide more consistent IT support to your organization, and avoid the steep costs of getting stuck in a cycle of hiring and training new staff.

Scale Your Operations with Ease

Underlying every great company growth story is an impressive ability to scale up operations. Barriers standing in the way of growth often impact IT infrastructure and hiring—two things that co-managed IT provider can help manage.

Control Your Cybersecurity and Compliance Budgets

The effort required to protect against cyberattacks and meet wide-ranging compliance requirements has become so complex these days that it’s almost impossible to manage it effectively without some outside assistance.

Navigate Your Compliance Challenges with a Partner

Meeting regulatory standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and FINRA/SEC is critical for protecting sensitive data. It’s also critical to avoid steep fines and devastating reputational damage that can cost as much or more in the long run than data loss alone. Yet, the complexity and work that goes into maintaining strict compliance can stymie even the most dedicated IT leaders.

Not all co-managed IT solution providers will be able to offer you expert guidance, documentation, and continuous monitoring to ensure that you’re meeting all your regulatory compliance standards, but veteran providers like Astute Technology Management can save the enormous cost of managing that program in-house.

Shore Up Your Protection Against Cyber Threats

The costs associated with cybercrime continue to rise. In 2023, ransomware payments from businesses soared past $1 billion — a record high. Cybercriminals’ tools are much more advanced now thanks to generative AI, which lets them craft legitimate-looking phishing emails without the usual wonky graphics or telltale grammatical mistakes, meaning the threat of cyberattack will likely intensify.

With clever attacks coming on all fronts, many businesses are looking to gain economies of scale and deeper specializations in specific areas of cybersecurity weakness to prevent the worst outcomes.

Whether you want to improve your firewall management, cyber event detection and response, cybersecurity training program, or any other aspect of cybersecurity, working with a trusted partner is often the fastest and cheapest path to get there.

Streamline Hardware and Software Procurement

Investing in new hardware and software solutions can become expensive, particularly as new priorities emerge that can force your organization to pivot. By distributing the total cost of a tool over a wider client base, and leveraging deep vendor relationships and economies of scale, a co-managed IT services provider can provide access to cutting-edge cybersecurity, data protection, and IT management tools for a fraction of the cost of buying them on your own.

The Most Trusted Co-Managed IT Services Provider in Ohio

Do you need an outsourced IT partner to help you succeed in your job as an IT  leader? Businesses across Ohio have Astute Technology Management’s co-managed solutions high reviews. With deep experience working within the boundaries of a well-defined co-managed solution, we urge you to contact our team at 614 389 4102 or [email protected] with any questions you may have. We look forward to speaking with you!