Co-managed IT for El Paso businesses that already have IT staff
Co-managed IT means TechBit Solutions works alongside the IT staff an El Paso business already employs, covering monitoring, patching, security and after-hours support so one internal person is not the only thing standing between the company and a bad day.
What co-managed IT means
Co-managed IT means TechBit Solutions works alongside the IT staff you already employ instead of replacing them. Your person keeps the institutional knowledge and the relationships. We supply the coverage, the tooling and the second set of hands that one person cannot provide on their own.
It is a common arrangement for businesses in El Paso that have grown past the point where one internal technician can keep up, but are not ready to hand everything to an outside company.
Who it is for
- A business with one IT person who cannot take a holiday without something breaking
- A small internal team that is good at applications but stretched thin on security and infrastructure
- A company whose IT person spends the day on password resets instead of the projects they were hired for
- An office that needs coverage before 8am or after 5pm and cannot justify a second hire
- A business that wants an outside opinion on decisions their internal person is making alone
How the work splits
We agree the split in writing before we start, so nobody is guessing who owns what at two in the morning. A typical arrangement looks like this.
- Your team keeps: the line-of-business applications, the vendor relationships they already manage, on-site hands, and anything specific to how your company works
- TechBit Solutions takes: monitoring, patching, backup verification, security tooling, after-hours and weekend coverage, and escalation when something is outside your person's experience
- Shared: the help desk queue, project work, and the technology roadmap
None of that is fixed. If your internal person would rather own patching and hand us the help desk, that works too.
What is included
- Round-the-clock monitoring on servers, network gear and workstations
- Patch management for operating systems and common third-party software
- Backup monitoring and restore testing, so somebody other than your IT person is checking
- Security tooling and alerting across the environment
- Help desk coverage for your staff, at whatever level you choose
- Coverage during our hours, 5am to 8pm Mountain, plus the after-hours line
- A named escalation contact at TechBit Solutions who knows your environment
- Documentation your internal person can actually use, kept current
Fully managed or co-managed
The difference is not the quality of the work, it is who holds the day-to-day relationship with your staff.
Fully managed suits a business with no internal IT, or one where the person doing IT is really the office manager and would like their job back. TechBit Solutions becomes the IT department and your staff call us directly.
Co-managed suits a business that already has someone competent in the building. That person stays the face of IT internally, and we sit behind them.
If you are not sure which you need, that is a normal question and it takes about ten minutes on the phone to answer. Our managed IT services page describes the fully managed version.
The problem it solves
A single internal IT person is a single point of failure. When they are ill, on holiday, in a meeting, or simply asleep, the business has no cover. Most companies do not notice this until the week it matters.
The second problem is quieter. One person cannot be current on networking, Microsoft 365, security, backup, phone systems and whatever line-of-business software you run. They will be strong in two or three of those and improvising in the rest. Co-managed IT fills the gaps without anyone having to admit there were gaps.
Getting started
The first conversation includes your IT person. We are not interested in an arrangement they have been told about rather than asked about, because those do not work.
After that we look at what you have, agree the split in writing, and start. There is no discovery project to pay for before anything useful happens.
The first thirty days are described on the switching page, and what we hold ourselves to on response is on the response times page.
Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888. We answer in minutes during our hours, and we speak Spanish.
Questions we get asked
Will you try to replace our IT person?
No, and we will say that to their face as readily as to yours. Co-managed IT exists precisely because that person is valuable and there is more work than one person can carry. We take the parts that are hard to cover alone, such as nights, vacations, monitoring and patching, and we leave the parts your own staff does better than any outsider ever could.
Our IT person is worried about this. What do we tell them?
Tell them the goal is to stop them being the only line of defense. In most co-managed arrangements the internal person ends up doing more of the work they were actually hired for and a lot less resetting passwords at nine at night. We meet with them before anything is agreed, not after it is signed.
Can we start co-managed and move to fully managed later?
Yes, and it happens fairly often when an internal person retires or moves on. Because we are already inside the environment, the handover does not turn into a discovery project at the worst possible moment. That continuity is a large part of why businesses set it up this way.
Who do our staff call, you or our IT person?
Whichever you decide, and we will support either. Some businesses route everything to us so their internal person can work uninterrupted. Others keep that person as the first stop and send us the overflow and the after-hours calls. Neither is wrong.
Do we still get the response promise?
Yes. Anything routed to TechBit Solutions is answered in minutes during our hours, from our El Paso offices, exactly the same as for a fully managed client. You do not get a slower tier for sharing the work.