The instinct when an internal IT team is stretched is often to hire another person. Sometimes that's right. Often it isn't, and the deciding factor is rarely cost per hour — it's whether the gap is a volume problem or a depth problem.
If the issue is genuinely too much day-to-day work for the current headcount — more users, more devices, more routine tickets than the team can keep up with — another generalist hire who shares that workload is a reasonable answer, provided the business can commit to full-time, ongoing employment cost for what is, by definition, ongoing work.
If the issue is that the team is keeping up with volume fine but lacks specialist depth in a particular area — cloud architecture, complex networking, security engineering — hiring another generalist doesn't close that gap; it just adds another person who also doesn't have that specific expertise. Specialist skills used intermittently, for escalations and periodic project work rather than daily, are exactly the case co-managed support is built for.
There's a capacity-planning angle too: a new hire takes months to recruit and onboard to full productivity, during which the original capacity gap persists unchanged. A co-managed arrangement can close a capacity or capability gap in weeks, which matters when the deferred work — security risk, a stalled project — is actively getting worse while the vacancy sits open.
The honest framing is that these aren't always competing options. Many businesses land on both: an internal generalist handling volume and relationships, with a co-managed partner providing the specialist depth that would otherwise require multiple additional specialist hires the business doesn't have enough ongoing work to justify.
All technical perspectives