Co-managed IT services represent the latest development in the managed service industry. Many companies work with these providers as strategic partners to help them meet their increasingly complex IT requirements.
Apart from reducing overall IT expenditures, the principal upside of partnering with a co-managed IT service is that companies find the specialized support they need without the hefty upfront costs of installing internal IT infrastructure.
Traditional outsourced IT services and staffing companies differ from co-managed IT because the services only supplement your existing IT department, particularly in areas where they lack the latest expertise.
Moreover, managed IT services don’t replace your existing IT department, nor do they simply provide you with additional human resources. They, instead, provide companies with the specialized knowledge and tools along with the latest technology and infrastructure to optimize their IT.
The general concept behind the co-managed model is to present companies with an affordable, flexible, and scalable service that supports their teams in the most resource-intensive areas. This lets in-house IT staff meet their strict production expectations for the high-priority assignments.
IT departments are increasingly overworked, and the last thing you want is to take your vital internal staff out of the areas that impact your business by bogging them down with specialized tasks they’re ill-equipped to complete in a reasonable timeframe.
Ultimately, co-managed IT is meant to supplement your existing IT talent only, while managed IT staff members are specifically coached to work in unison with your hardworking employees by recognizing and supporting their unique capabilities.
Managed services aren’t any means job-replacing threats. The primary purpose of co-managed IT support is to help out departments that find themselves spread too thin.
If you’re new to co-managed IT, this article will serve as a beginner’s introduction to how the service works, covering several main touchpoints of this particular business model.
IT departments and the global tech talent shortage
The current labor shortage traverses across all industrials sectors, but it is especially prevalent in the STEM fields.
IT directors find themselves increasingly challenged to source the right talent when they need it. If they do, onboarding specialized IT staff comes at a high cost. To make things worse, as companies struggle to fill open positions, the skilled labor shortage has only intensified.
The reason companies are hiring at such as strong clip is that cybersecurity threats on small businesses have escalated in recent years and the criminal hackers are most sophisticated than ever.
Successful attacks are costly, so CEOs are prepared to invest the additional capital required to defend their companies against them. Yet they simply can’t find the right candidates to hire.
Instead, businesses are partnering with managed IT service providers to fill in the labor supply gap for cybersecurity specialists.
Small and medium-sized businesses simply can’t afford to leave their digital assets unprotected as they’ve become the latest target of malicious hacks.
This information often falls largely unreported in the press, but hackers are less focused on enterprise business now in favor of small companies because they display more security vulnerabilities.
For threat actors, this means more opportunities to penetrate systems and they’re quite aware that many in-house IT departments remain unprepared to detect and defend against their attacks.
Many IT departments are overworked
As breach risks have escalated sharply, internal IT departments struggle to focus on their core business tasks. IT directors are subsequently forced to delegate strategic projects to less experienced team members currently juggling complex security issues on top of their normal work duties.
This leaves little room for training opportunities, and without staying up to date, resolving the latest security breach takes even more time. As you might imagine, this results in a snowball effect that leads to late or incomplete projects and low morale among a work-stressed IT department that does not feel like it can succeed.
Co-managed IT support is critical in these situations because they allow your internal staff members to refocus on their main business duties while specialists from the managed service use their arsenal of tools and skills to tackle complex problems.
Skills gaps mean low productivity
You may have the brightest and most qualified IT staff money can buy, but an understaffed team won’t suffice when the work starts piling up and critical projects become backlogged. More than 80% of U.S. IT departments struggle with skills gaps.
The issue is so pervasive that it has gone by more than 155% in the last few years. When employees lack up-to-date training and knowledge, employers stand to lose as much as $22,000 per employee while downtime increases by more than 400 hours every year.
The severity of the current skills gap could result in a whopping 8.5 trillion globally. It is, therefore, easy to see why more and more companies are turning the co-managed IT model to bolster their existing IT departments.
Partnering with managed IT services near me
PCH Technologies in New Jersey offers co-managed IT solutions that help companies defend against cybersecurity incidents while keeping their operations running smoothly during times of high-volume activity.
Dial (856) 754-7500 to schedule your discovery call with PCH Technologies today.