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The honest answer is: not for everyone. And I would rather tell you that up front than have you spend time on a discovery call we could both spend somewhere more productive.
This article gives you the full picture: what managed IT is right for, what it is not right for, and how to know which side of that line your firm sits on before anyone picks up the phone.
Managed IT means an external firm takes ongoing responsibility for your technology environment. Not just support tickets when something breaks, but a partner who will be doing proactive monitoring, cybersecurity management, backup and recovery, strategic planning, and offer a support team that is responsible for your systems staying healthy and your users staying productive.
It is not on-call consulting, or a break-fix support with a monthly retainer attached. It is also not a substitute for every internal IT function a larger enterprise would have. We are not a replacement for a full IT department at a 300-person company with complex custom infrastructure.
The firms that get the most value from managed IT are the ones in the middle: too large and too technology-dependent to go without IT support, but too small to justify a full-time IT hire or an internal IT team.
After 20 years of working with professional services firms in Pittsburgh, here is the profile that predicts a productive partnership:
That last one matters more than the others. The clients we work best with are the ones who treat the relationship as a partnership. That means expectations get raised when they should be, problems get surfaced before they become crises, and technology decisions get made with the whole business context in the room.
I want to be as specific here as I was above, because this is where most MSPs go quiet and I think that is a mistake.
You call when something breaks, someone comes out and fixes it, you pay per incident. This works fine if your technology is simple, your staff is technically capable of managing day-to-day issues, and you have low tolerance for unpredictable costs but high tolerance for downtime.
It stops working when something serious happens, like a ransomware event, a server failure, a migration gone wrong, and you realize the provider who took your calls had no ongoing visibility into your environment and no baseline to recover from.
For firms around 50 users and above, this conversation comes up. The honest cost analysis: a competent IT generalist in the Pittsburgh market runs $65,000 to $85,000 in salary plus benefits, before you account for tools, training, coverage when they are out, and the skills ceiling of a single person.
You get one person, with one person’s knowledge and one person’s availability. When that person leaves, you start over. When something is outside their expertise, you bring in a consultant anyway.
The managed IT model gives you a team, with engineers, cybersecurity staff, a help desk, and strategic oversight, at a cost that for most 20 to 60 user firms is comparable to or less than a single fully loaded IT salary.
If you have existing IT staff and are considering adding managed services on top, co-managed IT is worth understanding separately. Request a free cybersecurity audit with us. We will give you an honest overview of what your IT and cybersecurity needs.
Ask yourself three questions:
If the answer to the first is yes and the other two are no, managed IT is worth a serious conversation. If the answer to the third is low cost, that is not a criticism, it is useful information that will save us both time.
Generally, below 15 users the economics get challenging and the complexity does not usually justify the full managed model. There are exceptions, though, like high-compliance firms with very small headcounts that sometimes need the coverage. But for most businesses below 15 users, a hybrid or light-touch model is more appropriate than fully managed services.
Professional services firms, such as financial, legal, insurance, engineering, healthcare services, with 20 to 100 users, headquartered or with a primary office within about an hour of Pittsburgh. Little or no internal IT staff. Technology-dependent and compliance-aware. Looking for a partner, not just a provider.
Our Three-Phase Onboarding process runs roughly 60 days. Phase one deploys our tools, security baseline, and monitoring across your environment. Phase two fine-tunes based on what we find and begins establishing the client experience. By day 60, you are fully onboarded. The first Strategic Business Review happens within the first 90 days.
If the profile above sounds like your firm and you want to understand what a partnership with Midnight Blue actually looks like, that is what we do in a discovery meeting. Book yours, and remember, this is not a sales call, it is a real conversation about your business needs.
Contact Midnight Blue: Schedule a conversation with us.