At some point, every growing business hits the question: do we hire someone for IT, or do we outsource it?
Usually the trigger is pain. The business owner is spending too much of their own time on IT problems. The office manager has become the unofficial help desk. Things break more often than they used to. The question becomes whether to bring someone in-house or engage an external IT provider.
The honest answer is that both can work - but they solve different problems, and the trade-offs are worth understanding before you commit.
What One IT Person Can Realistically Cover
A single internal IT hire gives you a dedicated person who knows your environment inside and out. They're on-site, they understand the business, and they can respond to issues straight away.
But "IT" at a modern business covers a lot of ground - help desk support, servers and networking, cloud services, security, backups, software updates, vendor management, new staff setup, hardware purchasing, and planning for the future. That's a lot for one person. In practice, most solo IT staff spend the bulk of their time fixing things that break, with limited capacity for the proactive work that prevents problems.
And when that one person is sick, on leave, or resigns - you have zero IT capacity. No backup, no escalation path, no second opinion.
What a Managed IT Provider Offers
A managed provider gives you a team rather than a single person. That typically means a help desk with multiple staff, engineers with different specialisations, monitoring across your systems, and established processes for the routine stuff - onboarding, backups, security updates, and incident response.
The core value isn't that a managed provider is necessarily smarter than your internal person - it's that you're getting breadth and coverage that a single hire can't replicate, with built-in redundancy when someone is unavailable.
The Cost Question
The instinct is to compare a salary against a monthly fee. That comparison is incomplete.
An in-house IT person costs more than their salary. Add superannuation, leave, training, the tools and software they need to do their job, and the cost of recruiting a replacement when they eventually move on. All-in, you're typically looking at $120K-$170K per year for one person with no after-hours coverage and no backup.
Managed IT for a typical small business of 20-60 people usually runs $100-$200 per user per month. For a 30-person business, that's roughly $36K-$72K per year - for a full team with coverage, escalation paths, and a range of expertise.
The numbers generally favour managed IT at smaller scale. It gets closer as you grow past 80 or so users, where the cost per head adds up and you can justify multiple internal hires covering different areas.
Where Each Option Wins
In-house is strongest when you need someone physically on-site to deal with hands-on issues - warehouses, manufacturing, retail. An internal person also builds deep knowledge of your specific workflows, people, and quirks.
Managed IT is strongest when you need breadth of expertise, consistent coverage regardless of leave or turnover, proactive security, predictable costs, and the ability to scale as your team grows without hiring again.
The Hybrid Approach
Some businesses land in the middle - an internal person handling day-to-day user support, with a managed provider looking after the infrastructure, security, and anything that needs specialist knowledge or after-hours coverage.
This can work well, as long as there's a clear line between who's responsible for what. When that's ambiguous, things fall through the gaps.
How to Decide
A few questions that usually bring clarity:
- How many people do you have? Under 50-60 users, managed IT is hard to beat on value.
- How important is physical on-site presence? If most work is desk-based and cloud-oriented, remote support covers the vast majority of issues.
- What happens when your IT person leaves? Are you comfortable with no IT capability for the months it takes to find and onboard a replacement?
- What's your growth plan? Managed services scale more smoothly than trying to hire fast enough to keep up.
The Honest Take
We're a managed IT provider, so we have a perspective here. But the honest version is this: at small business scale, most organisations get better outcomes from managed IT - more capability, better security, more predictable costs, and no single point of failure.
The exception is when a business has a genuinely strong IT person and the budget to support them properly. A hybrid model - good internal support plus a managed provider for the heavy lifting - can give you the best of both.
What doesn't work is a single underfunded hire trying to cover everything alone. That's how you end up with burnout, gaps, and a resignation letter at the worst possible time.