There's a third option nobody told you about.
Most SMEs think they have two choices when IT gets stretched thin: keep pushing the same team, or hand everything to an outsider. This article introduces the option most business owners have never been told exists.
Imagine you hired a brilliant chef to run your restaurant kitchen. She's talented — she can cook, manage stock, train junior staff, and handle the lunch rush. But you keep asking her to also fix the plumbing, design the menu graphics, service the refrigeration units, and file the GST returns. She does her best. But the food starts slipping. Because she's buried in things that have nothing to do with cooking. That's what most SMEs are doing to their IT teams right now.
The problem with how we've always thought about IT — For most small businesses, IT has worked like this: hire someone, give them everything, and hope for the best. But IT today is completely different. Cybercriminals are targeting SMEs more than ever. Cloud systems need ongoing management. Staff expect things to work from anywhere. Compliance requirements keep growing. And all of this is happening while your IT team is still resetting passwords and chasing printer drivers.
So businesses face a choice. Or at least, they think they do.
Option A: Keep doing what we're doing and hope the team keeps up.
Option B: Outsource everything and hand control to someone outside the business.
Most SMEs pick Option A — not because it's working, but because Option B feels like giving up.
What if there's an Option C that nobody told you about?
--- The third door: Co-Managed IT
Co-Managed IT means your internal IT team and an external IT partner work together — not one replacing the other, but each doing what they do best. Your team knows the business. They know the history, the culture, the people. What they often don't have is time, or depth in specialist areas like cybersecurity, cloud management, or after-hours monitoring. A good MSP (Managed Service Provider) brings exactly those things — 24/7 monitoring, cybersecurity and data backup specialists, handling the routine repetitive tasks that eat your team's time, so they can focus on the things only they can do.
What does this look like day-to-day?
An SME with one IT manager and one helpdesk person:
- IT manager: business software, planning, vendor relationships.
- Helpdesk: daily user requests, device setup, troubleshooting.
- MSP in the background: 24/7 security monitoring, patch management, backup verification, assisting in data restoration / recovery and after-hours coverage.
Nobody is being replaced — your team is freed up to do more valuable work.
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Think of it like a law firm. They keep internal counsel for everyday work, but bring in specialists — a tax barrister, an IP expert — when needed. They don't hire every specialist full-time, and they don't outsource their entire legal function. They use the right people for the right jobs.
Co-Managed IT works the same way. You keep control. You just stop expecting your team to be everything to everyone.
"But isn't that what we already have?". Maybe you work with an IT support company occasionally. That's not the same thing. Traditional IT support is reactive — you call when something breaks, they fix it, you pay. Co-Managed IT is a structured, ongoing partnership where both parties know exactly what they're responsible for. It's the difference between hiring a cleaner when the house gets messy, versus a regular schedule that means it never gets that messy.
In the following article, walk through a simple way to figure out where your team's time is actually going — and which parts of your IT could benefit most from a different approach.
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If your organisation is exploring how a co-managed IT model could work for your team, or has questions about structuring an MSP partnership, the SMSSB team is here to help.