In-house IT, outsourced, or both?
The question comes up in every company as it grows: do we hire an IT person or work with a firm? The honest answer is that it depends on your size and on what you have to manage, and that the right choice is often a combination of the two. Let’s put the options side by side, with the strengths and limits of each.
The in-house person: close at hand, but on their own
A specialist on your payroll has one advantage no outside firm can fully match: they’re right there, they know your people, and they hear about problems before those turn into support tickets. For large companies, with hundreds of users and their own in-house applications, an internal department isn’t even a choice, it’s a necessity.
The limits show at small and mid-sized companies. One person costs as much per month as a few dozen subscriptions, takes holidays and sick days, and one day hands in their notice, and the passwords, configurations, and history walk out with them, unless someone made them document it all. There’s also the coverage problem: that same person would need to be equally good at networking, servers, licensing, and cybersecurity, which in practice doesn’t happen.
The outside firm: broad, documented, with deadlines
An external team covers exactly these gaps. It doesn’t all go on holiday at once, it spans more specializations than any single person can, and it works to deadlines written into the contract, in our case at most one hour on critical incidents. Everything about your company is documented from the first day, because without documentation an outside firm simply can’t function: inventory, access permissions, a history of interventions.
Its limit is distance. An external provider won’t feel the pulse of the office the way a colleague sitting there does, which is why serious service starts with an on-site audit and continues with 24/7 monitoring, replacing part of “being there” with “seeing everything.”
The combination: routine outside, projects inside
At companies that already have an IT person, the “in-house or outsourced” question is often the wrong one, because the right answer is “both.” We take on the routine: the monitoring, the updates, the backups, the day-to-day support, while the in-house person keeps the projects and everything only they know about the company. They’re spared the late nights and the “my printer won’t work,” and the company is spared the risk of depending on a single person.
Exactly how the work is split gets settled at the audit, together with them, not over their head. In our experience, these arrangements are among the calmest of all: each side handles the part it does best.
How to decide, in practice
Below a few dozen users, an external subscription wins the math almost every time: it costs a fraction of a salary, covers more specializations, and comes with contractual deadlines. Past a certain size, or with your own applications to manage, the in-house person becomes necessary, and the outside firm stays as the layer of routine and coverage. If you’d like the math run on your own numbers, a free audit ends with exactly that: a written recommendation, with the reasoning behind it.