As a business owner, you have more likely than not been faced with the challenge of employee retention, especially when it comes to maintaining talented employees. For small business owners, these challenges can be even more difficult to manage when faced with additional difficulties such as shortages of skilled employees, inflation, navigating supply chain shortages, and cash flow difficulties. For small to medium-sized businesses, co-managed IT services are a great option for organizations to reap the benefits of talented IT staff without actually having to hire individual IT staff members.

Today’s job market is more competitive than ever, where demand for employees is high and the average salary is increasing. This makes it even more difficult for business owners to find and retain high-performing, successful employees working in IT. For small business owners, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire successful IT individuals. An increase in the average salary causes positions to stay open for months on end, putting the security of the entire company at risk without an individual dedicated to the management of sensitive information.

While it may not seem like there could be such a simple solution for such a large, timely, complex project, there actually is a relatively easy solution to implement if your organization is struggling to find skilled IT talent.

At BECA, we provide Atlanta-based managed IT services. We work to positively impact your bottom line while working to optimize growth and achieving scalability and increasing productivity. Throughout the course of this piece, we will outline what co-managed IT services are, the benefits of the services, and how you can go about integrating this into your organization.

Co-Managed IT Services – What is it?

Before considering utilizing co-managed IT services for your organization, it is necessary to have a deep understanding of what this service entails. Typically, co-managed IT services refer to a management service team that allows for an organization to determine how their IT services are managed both internally and externally. Essentially this means that an organization picks and chooses which aspects of IT and cyber security they would have to manage and oversee in-house and which they are comfortable giving up the control for an outside organization, such as BECA to manage.

The difference between managed and co-managed IT services is that with co-managed, your organization is still able to have control over some specific aspects of IT services. You are able to choose these based on the skills of current employees and the risks associated with giving up control of certain aspects.

Each co-management system looks different depending on the goals and needs of that individual organization. Generally, organizations make the decision to utilize co-managed services when taking on a new project within the organization, when current IT staff members are struggling to manage current tasks, or when there is a knowledge gap.

Additionally, utilizing co-managed IT services can provide direction and skill in a variety of areas throughout your organization, such as:

Hardware
Software
Systems
Network administration
Risk analysis
Budgeting
Planning

Now that you likely have a general overview of co-managed IT services and when they are typically utilized by organizations, we can take a deeper look into some of the benefits organizations find once they have chosen to integrate co-managed IT services into their organization.

Benefits of Co-Managed IT Services

There are numerous benefits of co-managed IT services for organizations of all sizes. Some of the benefits that organizations can expect to experience are:

Lower overall operating costs
Strategic planning development
Increased cyber security efforts
Increased productivity
Higher profitability
Minimized downtime

By missing out on the opportunity to outsource your IT department, your organization could be losing the ability to prevent IT crisis, as well as lose out on the opportunity to gain invaluable expertise.

One of the most important and impactful benefits of co-managed IT services is the decrease in IT management responsibility. Utilizing these services allows the operations of your organization to continue running smoothly and efficiently while doing less work. Additionally, your organization does not have to worry about the time it takes to onboard and train a new IT staff member to manage these responsibilities since the outsourced individuals are experts.

Another major benefit of co-managed IT services that should be noted and heavily considered is the increased security that comes from utilizing these services. If your organization is struggling to manage current tasks as is, you will most likely find they do not have the extra time to actively monitor all current and potentially unknown security risks. In the heat of the moment and for the sake of time, employees may tend to look over risks that do not require their direct attention at the moment. When making the decision to utilize co-managed IT services, you can ensure that the service provider has your organization’s viability at the forefront of its mind and will do everything in its power to manage that successfully.

Finally, we will look a little bit into the implementation process for co-managed IT services, specifically how we operate at BECA.

Implementation Process for Co-Managed IT Services

Before beginning to discuss the implementation process, it is important to note that before our team even considers beginning this process, we take the time needed to develop a holistic understanding of your organization, how you operate, and where you may need some extra help. We put our clients first and in order to live this out, we examine each client’s individual needs before we begin to customize our services.

Let’s break down the implementation process for co-managed IT services into three different steps, which are:

Step 1: Prepare your workplace environment for change.
Step 2: Train your staff on support requests and establish a “go live” date.
Step 3: Hold regular strategic business technology reviews.

Through these three steps, we ensure first that your organization is ready and welcoming of change and make sure there is a positive stigma around the proposed outsourcing solutions. From there, we begin to train your current staff members on how their daily operations may change and show them how our team operates. We also set a tentative “go live” date during this process to keep everyone on track.

Finally, we begin to host strategic meetings in which discussions about specific business technology are held. Holding these regular conversations allows us to better understand where your organization stands before the “go live” date and ensure that all knowledge gaps are filled.

Learn More About BECA’s Co-Managed IT Services

Now that you know more about how we operate here at BECA, are you interested in learning more about how our co-managed IT services can bring about positive change within your own organization? Set up a time to chat with one of our experts! We will ask you some questions so that we are able to better understand your organization and then the floor is yours to express your current IT concerns.