Co-managed IT for 50 to 200 seats: in-house team or MSP?

Serving a hundred users well requires four distinct skill sets:

• User support The day-to-day service desk.
• Infrastructure Network, servers, cloud.
• Protection Firewall, endpoints, identities, incident response.
• Management Planning, suppliers, reporting to the board.

One person carrying all of that is a single point of failure. Two leave half the team alone whenever someone is on holiday. In our scenario, each engineer costs the company between €30,300 and €40,700 a year; three exceed €90,000. Then add the tools (monitoring, security, backups, ticketing) and the nights and weekends, which a small team cannot cover without shifts.

Below 30 or 40 workstations, an engineer or a retainer will do. Above that, complexity piles up: more addresses or remote working, more business software, audits, clients demanding guarantees, tougher security rules. In several sectors, NIS2 makes management itself accountable for cybersecurity.

At the same time, choices arise that only someone on the inside makes well: which ERP to adopt, how to absorb an acquisition, where to put the budget.

MSP, in one sentence: a Managed Service Provider manages your technology continuously, under contract and for a monthly fee, instead of turning up only when something breaks.

The company hires a single profile, the IT lead, and hands technical execution to the partner. That lead does not fight fires. They know the business, set priorities and hold the MSP to account. This is how DataRoad structures the external IT department for companies of this size.

• All in-house Hundreds of workstations, highly bespoke systems or on-site engineers across several shifts, with the budget for a full team.
• Co-managed 50 to 200 workstations, substantial business software and the need for a technical voice with the board, without carrying a whole team.
• All with the MSP No complex internal applications, a preference for a single external contact and a fixed cost. It also works above 50 workstations, with regular meetings with the board.

It fails when nobody knows who owns each task. It works with five rules:

1. A matrix in the contract: the split above, signed by both parties.
2. A shared request queue: company and MSP on the same system, nothing lost in email.
3. Documentation held by the client: inventory, network map, credentials and backup policy kept up to date.
4. Regular review with numbers: requests, response times, incidents, projects and alerts from the NOC and monitoring.
5. Decision-making power: the in-house lead decides and speaks directly to the board.

With IT Unlimited, managed cybersecurity comes built in: firewalls, sensors, device protection, 2FA/MFA and alerting. For those who cannot stop out of hours, Premium 365, from €1,200/month + VAT, adds nights, weekends and bank holidays; it is the only plan with 24/7 support and monitoring. The contract is annual, renews automatically and no tie-in.

Velv by OnRising develops nearshore software from Porto, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. It extended its IT Unlimited contract with DataRoad to close to 200 workstations.

What moved out of the building: service desk, firewalls and network security, wireless network, servers, cloud, printing and internet, preventive and corrective maintenance, and 24/7 oversight with alerts and reports on Premium 365. Read the Velv by OnRising story.

We assess infrastructure and team and return the responsibility matrix, with a fixed IT Unlimited proposal. No commitment.

More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and telephone support. Call +351 211 459 950 * or write to sales@dataroad.pt.

*Call to a Portuguese landline.

• PwC, Tax Guide 2026, employer social security contribution of 23.75%
• Portuguese Labour Code, Law 7/2009, holidays and training