Co-managed IT: senior infrastructure depth for teams that already have IT
Built for the one-to-ten-person IT team that is competent and completely underwater. We take the infrastructure depth; your team keeps the keys.
Written for the IT manager, on purpose
Most MSP pitches die inside IT departments, and they deserve to. They are written for the CFO, they price per seat, and somewhere in paragraph four it becomes clear the plan is to make the internal team redundant. If you run IT at your company, you have read that pitch and binned it. Good.
This is a different model. You and your team know the business, the users, and where the bodies are buried. What you probably do not have is a senior virtualization person, a real DBA, and someone who has run a restore test this year, because no company your size can hire all three. That specialist layer is what we supply.
You stay in charge. We make your team deeper, take the after-hours infrastructure pager for the incidents that justify one, and give you someone to argue architecture with who is not also a vendor trying to sell you hardware.
What we cover
- Infrastructure monitoring and maintenanceHosts, storage, and core services instrumented, patched, and reviewed monthly.
- Cloud and virtualization platform ownershipvSphere, Nutanix, Hyper-V, or Proxmox, plus your Azure or AWS footprint, owned at the platform layer.
- Database administrationThe Remote DBA service, folded into the same engagement for estates that need it.
- Backup and DR ownership, with restore testingJobs monitored, chains validated, restores actually tested on a schedule and documented.
- Patch and vulnerability managementA monthly cycle for servers and infrastructure, with an agreed emergency path for the bad CVEs.
- Escalation, vendor coordination, and roadmap inputSenior hands on infrastructure incidents, one throat to choke across your vendors, and budget-season numbers your CFO can use.
What we deliberately don't do
Saying this out loud costs us some deals and saves the rest. These are outside the engagement, full stop:
- End-user helpdesk and password resets
- Desktop and laptop break-fix
- 24/7 phone support
- Printer and peripheral support
If you need a staffed helpdesk, we will say so in the first call and can point you at firms that do it well. Pretending otherwise is how a firm our size ends up failing at both jobs.
Coverage, honestly stated
| Window | What happens |
|---|---|
| Business hours, 8–5 CT | Standard coverage: monitoring response, scheduled work, escalations, and the monthly review cadence. |
| After hours | A defined escalation path for infrastructure-severity incidents only: a down cluster, failed storage, a database that will not start. The exact contact chain and expectations are written into the agreement. We do not publish a numeric SLA we cannot staff, and you should be suspicious of firms our size that do. |
Engagement tiers
Your team runs the environment; we are the senior escalation path for infrastructure incidents, plus quarterly architecture and roadmap reviews.
We own virtualization, database, and backup/DR outcomes, including patching and restore tests. Your team owns everything user-facing.
Everything in Shared Ownership plus monitoring operations, vulnerability management, vendor coordination, and budget planning input.
Every tier is month to month after the first quarter, with a documented handover if we part ways. Fixed scope, exit ramps at every phase.
Common questions
Are you trying to replace our IT team?
No, and the model does not work if we try. Your team knows the business, the users, and the history. We bring the deep specialist work most internal teams cannot justify hiring for: virtualization platform ownership, senior database administration, DR that gets tested, security remediation. Your team stays in charge; we make them deeper.
Do you provide 24/7 support?
No, and we will not pretend to. Standard coverage is business hours, 8 to 5 Central, with a defined after-hours escalation path for infrastructure-severity incidents: a down cluster, a failed storage array, a database that will not start. What we do not offer is an overnight phone line for password resets, and we would rather tell you that here than in an incident.
Do you do end-user helpdesk or desktop support?
No. No ticket queue for user issues, no desktop break-fix, no printer calls. Plenty of firms do that well. We stay at the infrastructure layer, and saying so up front is how we keep the engagements we take in good shape.
We already have an MSP. Does this still fit?
Often, yes. A helpdesk-oriented MSP and a co-managed infrastructure partner cover different layers, and we work alongside incumbent MSPs today. Where the overlap is real, we will map it honestly in the first conversation rather than sell around it.
What does it cost?
Monthly retainer, tiered by environment size and scope, with the tier contents listed on this page. We publish the structure and put exact numbers in a proposal after a scoping call, because pricing an unseen environment is how surprise invoices get made.
Related services
Bring your org chart and your worst outage story.
Thirty minutes with the engineer, not a sales rep. We will tell you which tier fits, or that none of them do.