Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Lynnwood and Snohomish County, founded in 2005, offering both fully outsourced managed IT and co-managed support that works alongside an existing internal team.
Does a business with internal IT staff still need a third party involved? Sometimes. MSPs generally do one of two things: handle everything for smaller organizations, or augment an internal team that already exists.
Do-it-all versus augmentation
In the do-it-all case, the business does not have enough work to justify a full-time hire, but has enough complexity that it genuinely needs technical expertise on hand. These organizations often try a single “one-man-band” hire first, before finding that no one person can realistically stay on top of everything technology now requires – it takes a team.
Augmentation is more nuanced and depends on the size, complexity and capability of the internal team already in place. It typically shows up in two shapes: routine, lower-level work – patching, updates, monitoring – handed to an MSP whose tooling makes that automatable at a cost most internal teams cannot match on their own, freeing internal staff for work that touches the business more directly; and discrete projects, where an MSP brings in expertise the internal team does not have, or acts as a safety net on work that is a stretch for them to handle alone. An MSP can also provide backup staffing for vacations or absences, since it is already familiar with the environment, and its broad exposure across many clients means a problem solved once for someone else often has a ready answer for you too.
The honest answer: sometimes neither
If an environment is simple enough and unchanging enough, a capable internal team with occasional third-party audits may genuinely be sufficient. A good outside provider will tell you that, and will help with the hiring process when bringing a function fully in-house is the right call rather than the wrong one.
How to tell which situation you are in: have the conversation directly with the internal team about what they see as their current challenges and where the business is headed. As a general shape of the market rather than a hard rule, there tend to be two points where bringing everything fully in-house starts to make operational sense on its own – roughly in the 50-to-100-employee range, and again above roughly 300. Those are industry patterns, not a qualifying test, and plenty of organizations outside that shape are well served by a co-managed arrangement instead.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our co-managed IT work deals with – talk to us about yours.
