Managed IT — Co-Managed
Co-managed IT for internal IT teams in New York
Security operations, escalation depth, and project capacity built around your existing IT team — with the division of labor in writing. We reinforce your people; we do not replace them.
Your team is competent. It is also outnumbered.
The 50-to-500-seat pattern is remarkably consistent: an IT director or small team that knows the environment cold, buried under password resets, Microsoft 365 administration, onboarding tickets, after-hours alerts, and compliance follow-ups — all competing for the same hours. The failure mode is not incompetence. It is queue depth.
Co-managed IT adds capacity and specialist depth around that team. Your people keep the work that benefits from institutional knowledge; we take the work that benefits from scale, tooling, and around-the-clock monitoring pipelines. Who owns what is written into the agreement — by function, not by vibe.
One structural commitment up front: we do not use co-managed engagements as a wedge to take the account. The agreement names your team’s ownership explicitly, our reporting goes to your IT leadership rather than around them, and any change to the division of labor is initiated by you. Your IT director should read this page and see reinforcements, not a rival.
What we typically take on
The functions below are where internal teams most often want depth. Any of them can sit on either side of the line — that is what the scoping conversation is for.
Security operations
Managed detection and response, vulnerability management, and continuous security monitoring — the discipline that punishes an understaffed team first.
After-hours escalation
Your environment monitored around the clock by our tooling, with an on-call engineer paged — so a 2 a.m. alert stops being your director’s problem by default.
Overflow and escalation support
Your team keeps the front line if they want it; we absorb overflow and take stalled or specialist tickets on an agreed path. See how our help desk runs.
Patching at scale
Test rings, maintenance windows, and compliance reporting across the fleet — the recurring chore internal teams can rarely protect time for.
Fleet and asset discipline
Hardening baselines and a live asset inventory, plus user lifecycle and access reviews run to a checklist your auditors will like.
Projects
Migrations, office moves and buildouts, network redesigns, server refreshes — delivered as scoped projects so your operational staff aren’t cannibalized to do them.
Compliance evidence
Control operation and audit artifacts for NYDFS Part 500, SOC 2 readiness, and insurer questionnaires. Your team owns the relationship; we produce the evidence.
Security leadership
A fractional vCISO when a regime demands a named security function your org chart doesn’t have.
The division of labor, drawn honestly
Every co-managed agreement includes a responsibility matrix: for each function — identity, endpoints, network, security operations, help desk, vendors — one owner and one backstop, in writing. It is unglamorous, and it is the difference between a partnership and a blame exchange.
The split also flexes as your team changes. Hire a security analyst and take triage back in-house; lose your senior sysadmin and we cover the gap while you rehire. The matrix gets amended — not renegotiated from scratch.
Common splits we run
Your team: users + LOB apps · Stedholm: security ops + infrastructure
Your team: the front line · Stedholm: escalation, after-hours, projects
Your team: compliance ownership · Stedholm: control operation + evidence
Questions IT directors ask us
Is this how you get a foot in the door to replace us?
No — and you should not accept that answer on faith. The agreement names your team’s ownership, reporting runs through your IT leadership, and any re-scoping is initiated by you. Non-displacement is a contract term here, not a talking point.
Whose tools do we use — yours or ours?
Where your stack is sound, we work inside it. Where a function needs our tooling — monitoring, detection, patch orchestration — we deploy ours with your team holding full visibility and access. Either way, the inventory of who runs what is documented and yours to keep.
Who do our employees call?
Whatever you decide: your team stays the front line with us behind them, or we take first contact and route the institutional-knowledge tickets to your people. The routing is defined in the agreement, and either arrangement can change as your team does.
Our IT director is skeptical. Fair?
Entirely. Most co-managed pitches are displacement pitches wearing a lanyard. Put your director in the scoping conversation — the model only works if they design the split, and we would rather lose the deal than start one over their head.
Which firms fit co-managed?
Typically 50–500 seats with at least one internal IT hire — often regulated mid-market firms such as financial services and law firms where the internal team owns the compliance relationship but needs specialist depth behind it. Smaller firms without IT staff usually want fully managed IT instead.
Reinforce the team you already trust.
Bring your IT director — the first conversation is about the division of labor, and they should be the one drawing it.