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What Is Co-Managed IT?

Your internal IT team plus an outside partner. Here is how the model splits the work.

Co-managed IT is a partnership where your internal IT staff and a managed service provider share responsibility for your environment, with the provider typically handling monitoring, patching, backups, security tooling and standards audits while your team focuses on end users and business applications. It is the model for companies that have IT people but not an IT department.

Why companies choose it

A one- or two-person IT team is stretched across help desk, projects, security, vendors and compliance, with no coverage on vacation and no budget for enterprise tooling. Co-managed IT gives that team a bench: engineers to escalate to, a 24/7 monitoring platform, security operations, and someone auditing the environment against a written standard. Your people stop drowning in maintenance and get to do the work that actually needs their knowledge of the business.

A typical division of labor

  • Your team: day-to-day user support, line-of-business applications, on-site hands, relationships with department heads.
  • The provider: monitoring and alerting, patch management, backup verification, security tooling (EDR, MFA, email filtering, SOC or MDR), firewall and network standards, documentation, recurring alignment audits, escalation engineering and strategic planning.

The split is adjustable. Some clients keep projects in-house; others hand those to the provider too. Who does what in a co-managed IT relationship has a fuller role map.

Co-managed vs fully managed

Fully managed means the provider is your IT department. Co-managed means you keep yours and add to it. Co-managed IT vs fully managed IT compares the two.

How Mentis Group does it

Our Co-Managed IT program lets internal teams focus on end-user support while Mentis handles the proactive, centralized and security-critical components, including Technology Alignment Engineers auditing against more than 350 standards and access to our security operations resources. It is especially strong for strengthening a cybersecurity program that an internal team cannot staff around the clock. If you are wondering whether your team has reached that point, read when does an internal IT team need outside help.

Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.