In-house IT or outsourced: when to switch
The question is rarely cost alone. It is coverage, depth, and what happens when your one IT person takes leave.
Most businesses arrive at this decision from one of two directions: they have one internal IT person who is stretched, or they have an MSP and are wondering whether to bring it in-house. The right answer depends on a few specifics rather than on a general principle.
What one internal person can and cannot cover
A capable IT generalist can handle helpdesk, hardware, onboarding and the day-to-day of a Microsoft 365 tenant for a few dozen staff. What no single person can do is cover eight to six every day plus evenings and weekends, be expert in networking and identity and security and telephony and cloud, and get through project work while the tickets keep arriving.
The failure mode is not incompetence. It is that the urgent crowds out the important. Patching slips, the backup report goes unread, the Conditional Access work that was scoped in March is still not done in November — not because anyone is slacking, but because someone always needs a printer fixed.
The leave problem
Ask what happens during a two-week holiday. In a lot of small businesses the honest answer is that IT stops, or the person answers messages from the beach. That is a business continuity risk that has nothing to do with technology.
Where outsourcing genuinely wins
- Coverage, including outside office hours.
- Access to specialists — an identity problem, a firewall problem and a Purview problem are three different people, and none of them is a full-time hire for you.
- Tooling. RMM, patch management, monitoring, documentation and backup platforms are already licensed and running, rather than a set of purchases you have to justify.
- Process. Ticketing, escalation, asset records and change control come as part of the service rather than as something you have to build.
Where in-house genuinely wins
- Physical presence. Manufacturing, labs, clinics and anywhere with equipment that needs hands on it regularly.
- Deep business-specific knowledge, particularly around a custom application nobody outside the company understands.
- Scale. Past a few hundred staff, a small internal team plus specialist partners is usually the better shape.
The arrangement that usually works best
It is not either-or. The pattern we see succeed most often is one internal person who knows the business, owns the relationships and handles what is best done in the room, supported by an MSP that carries the platform work, the out-of-hours coverage and the specialties. The internal person stops being the single point of failure and starts doing the work that actually needs someone on the inside.
Signs it is time to change something
Patching is behind and nobody can tell you by how much. The backup has not been restore-tested this year. Projects that were agreed six months ago have not started. Your IT person is the only one with the admin passwords. Any two of those together is worth a conversation.