Co-managed IT is a shared arrangement between your internal IT staff and OAC Technology. You decide what stays in-house. We take the rest, working inside your environment with documented access and a named technician your team will know by first name. We have supported Minneapolis and St. Paul businesses since 2000, and a growing share of them have an IT person of their own.
A fully managed IT contract means an outside provider runs everything. Break/fix means you call someone when something is broken. Co-managed IT sits between the two: your internal IT staff remain in charge, and we supply the depth, the tooling and the extra hands that an in-house department of one, two or three people cannot economically build on its own.
In practice that means your IT manager keeps the relationships, the strategy and the day-to-day knowledge of how your business runs, while we handle overflow help desk, monitoring and patching, the security stack, backups, projects and vacation coverage. The dividing line is written down before we start, and it can move as your needs change. If you would rather hand the whole thing over, our fully managed IT services do that instead.
Most of our co-managed clients recognize themselves in at least one of these:
You pick from the list. Nothing here is mandatory, and the arrangement is written down so both teams know who owns what.
Your users call your IT person first, or ours, or ours only after hours and on vacation days. Tickets we handle are documented so your team can see exactly what was done. Our technicians hold network administrator status or better, so escalations do not bounce.
We run 24/7 monitoring on servers, workstations and network equipment, apply operating system and third-party patches on a schedule you approve, and report on what was patched and what is still exposed. Your team gets the alerts too, or only the ones they ask for.
Layered security is expensive to assemble one product at a time. We bring an established stack, including Huntress managed detection and response with a 24/7 security operations center, endpoint protection, email filtering, multi-factor authentication and firewall management, and we operate it alongside your team. See our managed cybersecurity services for the full picture.
Offsite cloud backups with encryption that meets SOC 2, HIPAA and NIST standards, tested restores, and a business continuity plan your leadership can actually read.
Microsoft 365 administration, server support, cloud migrations and hosting. We handle the platform work so your team can handle the people.
Office moves, server replacements, network redesigns, migrations and rollouts, scoped and priced as projects so they do not sit on the backlog behind daily tickets.
We document what we touch, and the documentation belongs to you. When your IT manager wants a second set of eyes on a design, a vendor quote or a security decision, that is part of the arrangement, not a billable consult.
There is no single right split. These three are the most common starting points, and each is written into a simple responsibility matrix before we begin.
We can work inside your existing ticketing and remote management tools or bring ours. Either way, your administrators keep their access, credentials are managed rather than shared, and our access to your systems is documented, logged, controlled and reviewed under the same annual SOC 2 audit that covers everything we do. You can read what that audit involves on our SOC 2 compliance page.
The agreement is month to month, with no long-term contract. If the arrangement stops making sense, the documentation and the access stay with you.
We price by device rather than by user, using the same rates as our managed services plans. Because your team is handling part of the work, a co-managed plan is typically scoped to fewer services than a fully managed one and costs less. Use the managed services pricing calculator for a ballpark, then we will scope the split with you and quote a flat monthly rate.
We are not there to replace your IT staff, and we say so in writing. Our job is to make your team look good: faster resolution, fewer surprises, a security posture they can defend to leadership, and a partner who picks up the phone. Since May of 2000, 90% of our business has come through referrals, and a number of those referrals came from the internal IT people we work beside.
No. Co-managed means co-managed. If a client asks us to take over fully, that is their decision to make, and it is written into a different agreement.
Usually, yes. We will work in your ticketing system and remote management platform if that is what your team knows. Where our tooling is better or cheaper, we will say so and let you choose.
Coverage windows are part of the responsibility matrix. Many clients start with after-hours and vacation coverage only, then expand.
Onboarding begins with documentation and access review, and most co-managed arrangements are running within a few days. Urgent coverage, for example when an IT employee gives notice, can start faster.
Yes, on request. Healthcare clients and their business associates get a BAA; everyone gets confidentiality in writing.
That is the point of it. The split is reviewed as your team, your business and your risk change.
Co-managed IT fits a business that already has an in-house IT department of one, two or three people and wants help desk overflow, 24/7 monitoring, the security stack, backups or project capacity behind them while keeping control. Most of our clients have between 5 and 200 employees, and co-managed arrangements sit toward the upper end of that range. The split of duties is written down before we start.
If your IT department is one person deep, or one project behind, we would like to hear how it is going. Call 952-548-5558 or contact us for a free conversation about where the line between your team and ours should sit. You can also start with the pricing calculator.
