6 Critical Ways Co-Managed IT Services Help Your Houston Business

Have you considered using co-managed IT services in Houston to help your in-house IT team tackle critical IT projects? Imagine having the perfect blend of your own IT team's expertise with the resources and specialized knowledge of an external IT provider. This is exactly what co-managed IT support firms like Braintek provide. This means more flexibility, enhanced security, and scalability for your IT network, without the costs of overstretching your budget.

In this post, we’ll go over what co-managed IT services in Houston do and the specific ways they can help your unique business excel with a thriving IT network.

What Are Co-Managed IT Services?

Co-managed IT services refer to an outside IT support group that works in conjunction with your in-house IT team for a determined period of time each month. This differs from fully managed IT services in that the co-managed IT support company is working with your established IT team to manage your IT network instead of taking on full ownership of your network. There are benefits to both service types depending on your requirements and capacity.

With fully managed IT services, you typically get a wider range of support and services, such as a 24-hour help desk, miscellaneous issue resolution, and proactive maintenance. The fully managed IT provider option is more proactive, setting up things like servers and firewalls as part of a larger IT initiative and providing IT support for users daily.

Looking at co-managed IT services, there is a lot of overlap, but generally, it just comes down to the fact that the services provider functions more as a support asset instead of your sole IT resource. Typically, small businesses that rely on Houston co-managed IT services will be more established and already have a dedicated IT network in place. But, as their business grows, many small businesses find they don’t have enough staff or the specialized skills to implement some of the IT projects they need. This is where co-managed IT support comes in handy. By rendering dedicated support, Houston co-managed IT services can help you achieve more IT solutions while still not overtaxing your budget or your team.

 

6 Critical Ways Co-Managed IT Services in Houston Help Your Business

Logistically, IT network management is an endless list of tasks, maintenance, upgrades, and cybersecurity demands that are all competing for your staff’s time and your budget. The reality is that even with a dedicated group of highly experienced IT experts, there’s usually too much work for them to handle. This puts many Houston small businesses like you in a precarious position.

You can either onboard new IT staff and risk severely overspending your budget. Or, you can scale down your IT network and risk hampering your company’s growth and the level of service you can provide customers. Maybe you’ve wrestled with these decisions already. But you have an alternative.

Co-managed IT services give you a consolidated support system that frees up your team to take on priority tasks while also maintaining key functions and taking on new projects without strain. Essentially, you have another team of IT specialists at your disposal, but at a fraction of the cost of hiring one or even two new full-time members. his brings a host of benefits with the value of a mere monthly subscription. Let’s look at a few ways co-managed IT services in Houston can alleviate your IT needs.

 

1. Reduce IT Costs

The demands of IT are only growing, especially in the major business center of Houston. Some experts estimate that global spending on IT services could reach over $1B. This reflects the need for many organizations to not only adapt to market demands but also to support the needs of their internal staff.

Co-managed IT services in Houston offer a truly cost-effective solution without the price tag of hiring multiple new individuals just to cover your core IT needs. This option also helps ensure that you don’t have to cut your IT department because, while you’ll still rely on your internal IT team, they now have additional support to make their jobs easier and more impactful. You gain more services and solutions, and your team can prioritize tasks that will better position your company for success.

From the onset, the pricing for co-managed IT support is flexible and scalable. At Braintek, we do what's referred to as a block hours agreement in which you sign up for the number of hours you need support for, such as 10 hours a month. With this fee, you have access to an entire team of professionals, but not the salary and insurance costs that go with them. Not to mention, we can cover for your staff when they have vacation or if they’re sick for extended periods.

 

2. Eliminate Burnout and Overtime

Very often when Braintek steps in to provide co-managed IT support, it’s to help an overwhelmed or undertrained staff struggling to tackle all the work they need to get done. Burnout among IT workers is a leading cause of highly qualified staff leaving their companies. Not to mention that besides negatively impacting staff lives, this also threatens the quality of IT projects due to exhaustion. You may also end up dealing with significant overtime-related costs.

The solution is to incorporate more support to shoulder some of the IT projects and tasks overburdening your in-house team. Co-managed IT service providers in Houston can cover the extra work to free staff time and also expedite initiatives needed to meet some of the other major IT demands of your company. This service essentially delegates certain tasks to ensure that all IT needs are met professionally but not at the risk of over-taxing your in-house staff.

 

3. Meet IT Demands

Co-managed IT services provide dependable services in specific areas of your network that help alleviate the burdens of your core IT staff. This could range within all the areas of tech. For example, in one case that Braintek recently took on, we provided co-managed support in the form of server operations management for the customer. To free up the in-house team for bigger tasks, we went about providing server support and further optimizing their servers to make sure that they're backed up, while also handling any maintenance required. Our team also installed new software, ensuring that security and permissions were set up correctly. We also decommissioned servers with older, vulnerable services.

In this particular situation, our client benefited from co-managed services to accomplish more IT operations without overstretching themselves. Their onsite IT team handled all the desktop support-related issues such as user problems, computer setup, general application troubleshooting, and other in-house-related tasks. At the same time, Braintek worked with them on server management - effectively letting them achieve more IT tasks without sacrificing critical focus on their servers.

 

4. Make Implementations, Integrations, and Migrations Easier

Major IT implementations, integrations, and migrations are critical for updating your network solutions to make your business more productive, adaptable, and secure. However, these projects are complicated and require multi-levels of preparations and tasks to conduct effectively. Your team not only has to prepare for technology project rollouts, but they also have to balance their other daily tasks and be prepared to deal with random issues that occur too. Of course, such distractions can hamper your IT projects and even your business as a whole.

One study conducted by McKinsey-Oxford found that 17% of IT projects fail so badly that the cost of such a fruitless implementation can set the business back so much, that some businesses have to close. Co-managed IT services give you a major advantage in being able to spread the work out in a way that your IT projects are accomplished on time, and supported effectively to eliminate problems before they start.

These services are also great for helping you overcome obstacles your IT team is experiencing by leveraging additional talent to address the problems, or even prevent them in the first place. Or, you can delegate critical things like migrations entirely to your trusted IT services provider so that your team can tackle other internal projects.

For example, at Braintek, we recently orchestrated a migration to Office 365 for a customer who had delayed the shift for two years. The customer just didn't have the bandwidth and capabilities to initiate this complicated migration on their own, so they offloaded the project to us. We troubleshot all of the issues with the exchange server, trying to figure out what was going on with the migration and why it didn't work properly. This was a job in itself, but we successfully resolved the problems and migrated all their users to the 365 platform.

At each step of this singular project, many issues needed to be meticulously dealt with and resolved in order for the migration to succeed - which was a huge drain on the internal team. By bringing on our co-managed IT services, the customer was able to migrate to 365 in a much faster time than going about the process alone, and that’s with us also maintaining their server support. With a monthly fee, our team was able to do the tasks of multiple staff members but much more quickly and still within their budget, a win-win.

 

5. Access Specialty IT Resources Like Cybersecurity

Sometimes, businesses have a general IT department that does its best to manage all the network and applications but isn’t specialized enough to implement critical cybersecurity enhancements that are so important in our cyber-threat-heavy environment. This is something a co-managed IT service provider can provide as part of their package.

At Braintek, cybersecurity is one of our specialties and a core function that we offer to multiple customers as a fully managed or co-managed IT Service in Houston. This involves a holistic, proactive approach to monitoring, preventing, and mitigating threats for you in real-time as a service.

One of our customers, a manufacturer headquartered in London, has an office here in Boston - though their IT team is all based in London. This is a problem because, with cybersecurity, you really need a response team that is in your timezone and able to deliver emergency IT support as soon as an incident occurs. Therefore, we took on the role of their on-site support team.

To protect their network, we set up a VPN between both locations and implemented an application whitelisting software on the local Boston network. When their London location got hit with ransomware, it hit that part of the network in Boston too, as it was trying to propagate over to the network we were managing. However, because we were already managing this aspect of their IT, we had protections in place that blocked the attack and wouldn't allow it to run.

In that particular case, Braintek saved the local network from having any issues. The London office was more affected though, and indicative of why having the additional support of co-managed IT services pays off - especially if they offer specialized services like cybersecurity solutions.

 

6. Improve and Scale Your Infrastructure

Competitive companies are those that are the most scalable in their operations. This is especially important as your company grows and expands into new offices or new offerings. All of this change necessitates more IT tools to support your development.

If you haven’t already, you may need to migrate your data to the cloud, to a service like Azure (Entra), or incorporate new platforms to facilitate better management. Co-managed IT services like Braintek can do everything from advising you on the best solutions to spearheading the operation on your behalf. Because you have a support team working with you on your network in addition to your in-house staff, you have more flexibility and resources to evolve your IT network over time.

 

Defining Your Co-Managed IT Support

If you’re feeling stretched to accomplish your IT goals, contacting a co-managed IT service provider in Houston is the best way for you to maximize your budget and get the support you need. But how do you go about this? It’s very simple.

Gather your IT team and company leaders, and begin prioritizing your critical needs. Identify where your IT is lacking by simply asking things like:

• Do we need a 24-hour help desk?
• Do we need a VPN?
• Do we have a business continuity plan for our network?
• Do we need someone who can work on firewalls or exchange servers?
• How effective are our data backups, and do they need maintenance?

Whatever your priority needs are, list them and use this to find a Houston co-managed IT service provider who can reliably support these functions. Be sure to engage your prospective provider. They shouldn’t automatically try to sell you on their services but have a discussion about your needs and IT goals.

At Braintek, we make things easier by sending a responsibility matrix template for you to fill out so we can get the conversation started. Our goal is to help not just your business as a whole but also your IT team. To do this, we go over what kind of things you are lacking, from cyber security to project support, to ensure all your needs are met.

 

Access Co-Managed IT Services in Houston Now

No matter the size or industry of your business, dependable IT systems are critical for achieving your goals. From cybersecurity to VoIP services, our team at Braintek is capable of providing the co-managed IT services that will help you achieve a high-functional IT network while still conserving costs. With over 20 years of delivering positive results for our customers, we’re confident that we will help you both mitigate IT risks and enhance your network’s effectiveness.

Reach out to us at 346-477-8669 to begin our discussion, or get your free quote for services today.