At some point every growing business asks the same question: should we hire someone to look after IT, or pay a company to do it? Both can work well. The right answer depends on your size, how complex your systems are, and how much risk you can live with.
What you are really comparing
It is easy to compare a salary with a monthly invoice and stop there. The fair comparison is broader.
The true cost of an in-house hire
- Salary, plus benefits, payroll costs and paid time off
- Recruitment, and the time it takes to find the right person
- Training and certifications, which need regular refreshing
- Tools: monitoring, remote support, security and backup software, which a managed provider already has and spreads across many clients
- Cover for holidays, sick days and the weeks after they resign
What a managed service includes
- A team rather than one person, with a broader range of skills
- Monitoring and alerting, often around the clock
- Security tooling and expertise that is hard for one generalist to keep up with
- Clear processes and response targets, written into an agreement
- Predictable costs, usually a flat fee per user
Where an in-house person wins
An in-house hire has real advantages:
- Always on site. Walking over to someone’s desk is faster than any ticket.
- Deep knowledge of your business, its people and its quirks.
- Available for non-IT work, such as helping with facilities, AV, or projects that only loosely involve technology.
For a business with complex specialist systems, or a need for someone physically present all day, an internal person can be the better choice.
Where a managed provider wins
- No single point of failure. When one person holds every password and knows how everything fits together, the business is exposed every time they are sick, on holiday or resigning. This key-person risk is often underestimated.
- Breadth. Networking, Microsoft 365, security, telephony, backups and cloud rarely all sit within one person’s expertise.
- Security depth. Threats change weekly. A provider watching many environments sees patterns that a single business never would.
- Coverage. Monitoring and escalation outside office hours, without paying someone to be on call.
- Scalability. Adding ten staff does not mean hiring another IT person.
The hybrid option
Many businesses combine the two. An internal IT coordinator handles day-to-day requests and local knowledge, while a managed provider takes on monitoring, security, projects and escalation. It works best when responsibilities are written down clearly, so nothing falls between the two.
Questions to decide with
- How many staff and devices do we have, and how quickly are we growing?
- What would a week without our IT person cost us?
- Who holds our admin passwords today, and are they documented anywhere else?
- Does our work need someone physically on site every day?
- How would we cope with a security incident at 9 pm on a Friday?
- Could one person realistically cover networking, Microsoft 365, security, phones and backups?
A rule of thumb
For most small and mid-sized businesses without specialist systems, a managed service gives broader coverage and lower risk for a predictable cost. As a business grows larger, an internal IT lead working alongside a provider often becomes the right mix. Whichever route you choose, make sure your accounts, domains and documentation are held in the business’s name, not an individual’s.
If you are weighing it up, our managed service desk page explains how we deliver day-to-day support, with managed security and projects alongside it.