Co-Managed IT Support in Singapore
This page is the full transcript of our video on co-managed IT support, the model where your internal IT team and an external provider share the work. The video will appear here once published. Until then, the complete spoken script is below.
[Video embed: Co-Managed IT Support in Singapore, coming soon]
Full transcript
If your firm has an IT manager or a small IT team, but they are stretched, this video is for you. We are going to explain what co-managed IT support is, how it differs from fully outsourced IT, and how to tell whether it fits your situation.
So what does co-managed actually mean? In a fully outsourced model, the provider takes over everything: the helpdesk, the servers, the network, the vendors, the strategy. In a co-managed model, you keep your internal IT people, and we take the parts of the workload they cannot cover, under one agreed set of responsibilities. Your team stays in charge. We make them stronger.
What gets shared varies, but there is a common split we see in Singapore. The internal team keeps the work that needs business context: supporting the trading floor, dealing with department heads, managing line of business applications. We take the work that needs scale, tooling or twenty four seven cover: monitoring, patching, backups, security operations, after hours support, and the specialist projects that come up twice a year, like an office move, a cloud migration or a MAS TRM remediation programme.
Why do firms choose this instead of hiring? Three reasons.
First, coverage. One or two internal people cannot be on call every night and weekend. A co-managed partner gives you a bench, so leave, illness and resignations stop being single points of failure.
Second, tooling. Good monitoring, patching and documentation platforms cost serious money. In a co-managed arrangement you get the provider’s entire toolset as part of the service, usually for less than the licence cost of buying it yourself.
Third, depth. Nobody can be an expert in Microsoft 365, networking, cybersecurity and MAS compliance at once. Co-managed gives your team a specialist to call in each area, without four more salaries.
Why do some firms hesitate? Usually a worry about stepping on toes. Done badly, a provider arrives, takes the interesting work, and the internal team feels undermined. Done properly, the responsibilities are written down, the internal team leads, and the provider fills the gaps they choose to hand over. The internal IT manager should feel more capable after we arrive, not less. That is the test we hold ourselves to.
How does the commercial side work? Usually a fixed monthly fee for the agreed block of responsibilities, plus project rates for the bigger one off pieces. You should expect the responsibilities document to name exactly who owns what, system by system, so nothing sits in the gap between your team and ours.
Is co-managed right for you? It tends to fit firms with one to five IT staff, somewhere between about fifty and five hundred users, where the team is good but buried. If you have no internal IT at all, fully managed is usually the better route. If your team comfortably covers everything, you probably do not need us yet.
If you want to explore what a split of responsibilities would look like for your team, talk to us at globalitn.com. We will map it with your IT manager, not around them.