Managed IT Services
Managed and Co-Managed IT
Managed IT is an outside firm that runs some or all of your technology for a monthly fee: the help desk, the servers, the network, the cloud accounts. Co-managed IT is the same thing done alongside an IT team you keep, with the work divided between you.
- 60 companies on the shelf
- Coverage
Buyer's checklist
Eight questions that decide this purchase
Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.
- 01
What is driving this: cost, a skills gap, replacing a provider, or growth your team cannot absorb?
- 02
Do you want a help desk only, full management of your infrastructure, or a provider that works alongside the team you keep?
- 03
What is in scope: applications, backups, user devices, network gear, servers, phone systems? For each one, how deep should the service go, from repair only to full administration?
- 04
Where does the infrastructure live: in your building, in colocation, in a private cloud, in public clouds?
- 05
Do you need technicians on site at times, or is remote delivery enough?
- 06
What coverage do you need: business hours, extended hours, or around the clock? How will response and resolution be measured, separately?
- 07
Is the team answering your tickets dedicated to you, or shared across many clients?
- 08
How many tickets do you generate in a month, how complex are they, and would you prefer to pay per user, per device, or for a block of hours?
- Backup, disaster recovery and monitoring
- DevOps, SRE and infrastructure-as-code
ATAT&T
BBCN
CCBTS
- Cloud-to-cloud backup
- IT onboarding and consulting projects
GGTT
- Managed integration service (MiSP)
I
ITS
L
Linq
- Mobile billing and telecom expense management
- One-bill managed service agreement
- IT managed services and helpdesk
- Microsoft 365 licensing and support
- Lighting-as-a-Service
- Telecom expense management and audits
- Security awareness training and MDR
- Agentic integrations (HRIS, IAM, payroll)
- Automated workflow and approval management
TTPx
ZZayo
No company matches every box you checked
That usually means the combination is rare, not impossible. Clear a filter, or add the service and we will go find who can do it.
Capabilities come from published supplier material. We confirm them for your addresses before anything is quoted.
More on what it is
The scope can be narrow or wide, and that is the first thing to pin down. At one end is a help desk that answers your people's tickets by phone, email and chat. In the middle is management of your infrastructure: monitoring it, patching it and keeping its configuration in order. At the wide end a single contract covers cloud, networking, collaboration tools, storage, security and application support, so you are not buying each from a different vendor.
Most engagements follow the same path. They start with a consultation and an assessment of what you have, move to a proposed design, then implementation, then ongoing management with a periodic review. Good providers layer proactive monitoring on top of ticket handling, so they are fixing things before you call. If your systems live partly in your building and partly in public clouds, the same monitoring and patching should reach across all of it.
Two roles are worth knowing. The NOC, or network operations center, is the team watching your systems around the clock. A virtual CIO is a part-time technology executive who joins your planning conversations and keeps a roadmap current, separate from the technicians closing tickets.
Read the scope carefully on three points. Security work such as firewall management, endpoint protection and threat response is often a separate practice, so do not assume general managed IT includes it. See Managed Security. Response commitments tend to come in a narrow menu, a window of a few hours or the next business day, and anything in between has to be negotiated. And some providers have a minimum size of engagement, which a small company can discover late.
Who needs it
- You cannot recruit or keep skilled IT engineers.
- Your IT team is stretched between daily operations and the projects the business actually wants.
- You run too many disconnected systems for the people you have.
- You depend on older systems that need specialized, ongoing care.
- You would prefer a flexible cost to a fixed payroll for IT.
- You answer to HIPAA, PCI, SOC or ISO 27001 and need a provider whose own practices stand up to the same scrutiny.
If you have a capable IT team and a stable environment, you may need only a piece of this, such as after-hours coverage or a help desk. That is what co-managed is for.
Signs you need it
- IT spends its days firefighting and never gets ahead of problems.
- Nobody can say what in-house support really costs once salaries and benefits are counted.
- The same user complaints come up month after month.
- Your processes, workflows and alert thresholds were never written down.
- The support team cannot grow with the company, and the people they serve are unhappy with it.
How IT Raven helps
Add Managed and Co-Managed IT to your quote list and tell us what you run, how many people you support and what is frustrating you. A person takes that to the managed service providers in our 500+ partner network and narrows them on what disqualifies: the environments and platforms they really support, their coverage hours, whether they can put someone on site near you, their minimum engagement size, and the standards they can document.
We make the proposals comparable. Managing your servers can mean anything from watching an alert to owning the machine, so we line up what each provider would actually do, asset by asset, and how each one defines a response.
We stay on one thread through the assessment, the transition and the first months of service, which is when a handover goes wrong if it is going to. Managed IT often arrives with neighbors such as Backup and Disaster Recovery and Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and we quote those alongside. The same team is here at renewal.
How buying works
The store is the easy part. Staying on the account is the job.
Anyone can show you logos. The reason to buy here is what happens on install night, and on the ticket you open nine months later.
- 01
Build your quote list
Add services and companies as you shop. No form stands between you and the shelf.
- 02
We bring back real options
A person shops the bench against your addresses, then walks you through what fits and what does not.
- 03
We handle the order and install
Paperwork, site survey, install dates, cutover night. You get one thread, not five vendors.
- 04
We stay on your account
Same team for moves, adds, tickets and the next renewal. That is the part everyone else drops.