5 Strategic Benefits of Co-Managed IT Services

Today, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. In order to gain and maintain a competitive edge, businesses rely on technology in most critical aspects of their operations – whether sales, marketing, production, or finance. This reliance comes with the perpetual risk that should your IT go down temporarily or in a prolonged failure, so will your business.

Co-managed IT services exist to support small to mid-sized businesses through proactive software and hardware maintenance. In this article, we highlighted the top 5 strategic benefits of having a Co-managed IT services provider by your side.

1. Swift Return to Normalcy from Unforeseen Network Downtime

Today’s largely digital business environment demands uninterrupted network and device uptime for operational efficiency. Still, network downtime has persistently made its way to the top major concerns for organizations. 

Mere minutes of downtime have been known to deliver heavy financial blows to organizations, constituting a staggering $400 billion a year. And as if that’s not enough, prolonged downtimes eat up profits by approximately 9%. Network downtime can attract heavy fines for organizations bound by strict compliance regulations. Together, these costs can be devastating for small and medium-sized businesses.

A co-managed IT service provider offers a collaborative approach that blends the expertise of the in-house IT teams and external specialists to bring about swift recovery from unforeseen disruptions. This synergy breathes life into a proactive approach to 24/7 IT monitoring, setting base for the early detection and recovery action on potential issues. 

Protocols involving the integration of real time analytics and automated alert systems are put in place by your co-managed IT partner to rapidly identify, isolate and act upon potential issues sooner. This significantly cuts down on the duration and impact of downtime and reinsures reliability on the organization’s network infrastructure.

2. Sustained Scalability and Growth for SMBs

Co-managed IT service providers significantly enhance scalability for organizations by offering a flexible and adaptive approach to IT management; one that aligns with your evolving business needs. This model integrates the strengths of internal IT teams with the advanced capabilities of external specialists, creating a dynamic framework that supports scalable growth.

Among the ways in which co-managed IT service providers enhance scalability is through their ability to bring on-demand resources and expertise. Organizations often experience growth in their IT requirements due to changes in their business operations, market conditions, and unit project demands.

Co-managed IT providers offer scalable solutions that can be adjusted to allow your business to either scale up or scale down its IT capabilities without the need for further capital investment in new equipment to support that growth. Additionally, co-managed IT service providers facilitate seamless integration with cloud-based solutions, which can be tailored to support your business’s flexible needs.

Exploiting cloud infrastructure allows organizations to adjust their computing resources based on their current needs. Co-managed providers ensure that these cloud services are optimally configured and managed, allowing businesses to scale their operations efficiently while sustaining optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.

3. Increased Productivity and User Support

Co-managed IT service providers include other features at the end-user level, such as help desk and technical support for employee satisfaction. This type of focused support structure ensures timely and effective resolutions to the technical problems at hand with minimal impact on your day-to-day.

With co-managed IT services, your business can enjoy multi-tier helpdesk services. Depending on their service model, your co-managed IT provider may adopt a tiered support system where first contact is routed to a front desk. This is particularly useful for queries related to common issues and routine maintenance. More complex issues are referred to specialized technicians with more advanced expertise. Such a structured approach ensures issues are resolved as quickly as possible to avoid prolonged disruptions that may affect productivity.

Enhanced user support significantly affects productivity. With co-managed IT providers on board, technical ripples are calmed much faster and efficiently, allowing employees to naturally go on with their routine functions without being disrupted by frequent IT failures. Your IT environment, therefore, in which support is within reach all the time, offers a friendly atmosphere in which staff can be confident about the speed and responsiveness of the technical department.

4. Refined Cybersecurity Measures and Compliance

Co-managed IT service providers develop actionable incident response plans and put them into operation to minimize the after-effects of data breaches and ransomware attacks. By MSP standards, such strategies are regularly tested and updated in order to restore the organization’s core operations as soon as possible after security incidents .

In particular, this can be enabled by a sanctioned 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC). Co-managed IT services providers may establish a dedicated SOC for conducting round-the-clock monitoring and quick response to security threats. The SOC further helps identify on-going security incidents and deploy countermeasures in real-time to minimize the potential impact.

Another critical element of the co-managed approach is advanced vulnerability management. Deep scanning for vulnerabilities helps uncover and remediate security weaknesses across your IT network. This proactive stance helps block possible exploitation by cybercriminals.

Finally, co-managed IT service providers have accumulated experience and skills in various regulatory and compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA and PCI-DSS – to state a few. Co-managed IT service providers help organizations align their cybersecurity measures to conform to these requirements, thus reducing the risks of non-compliance breaches and its legal consequences.

5. A 25% – 45% Reduction of Unnecessary Costs

As opposed to a full time managed IT services provider, a co-managed IT provider significantly reduces the expenses associated with their talent recruitment. With full time MSPs, all the IT responsibilities are ceded to the MSP. With this approach, all (or almost all) control over your IT infrastructure and its management are delegated to the MSP.

However, for a co-managed IT provider responsibilities are shared between the two teams. Co-managed IT partners work hand in hand with in-house IT teams to manage tasks such as security patching and remote monitoring while the in-house team takes over more strategic IT duties.

Additionally, co-managed IT service providers are bound to enjoy the economies of scale and provide competitive pricing for their services. They can negotiate more favorable terms with technology vendors, hardware, software, and cloud services providers due to their larger customer base. 

It is estimated that a successful partnership with managed service providers allows organizations to reduce IT costs by 25-45%. This enables them to effectively balance their internal IT resources with external expertise, resulting in a significant reduction on labor costs and infrastructural expenses.

Conclusion

Co-managed IT service providers promise a wealth of benefits in scaling operations, strengthening cybersecurity and productivity, and ensuring improved support for users. It provides flexible IT solutions that adapt easily to the changing business needs, integrates advanced cybersecurity with proactive threat management, and generally ensures increased productivity realities based on better resource use and expert support. 

At Data-Tech, through the internal combination of knowledge and external specialization, we offer optimized IT operations with strong protection against threats and a minimum level of disruption, hence nurturing operational excellence for organizational success.

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