Managed IT
In-house IT team or hospitality IT partner: an honest comparison
In-house IT team or outsourced hospitality IT partner? An even-handed comparison of cover, cost, breadth, openings and the co-managed middle ground.
An in-house IT team wins on depth of knowledge, immediate physical presence and control of priorities. An outsourced partner wins on 24/7 cover, breadth across PMS, EPOS, network and security, and surge capacity for openings. MicroNet Global, a hospitality IT specialist working across 15+ countries, sees most groups above roughly twenty sites settle on a co-managed blend of the two.
That blend is not a fudge. It is what the maths produces once you price round-the-clock cover against a payroll, and count the technology domains a modern group actually runs.
What is co-managed IT?
Co-managed IT is a model where an internal IT team keeps ownership of strategy, budget and vendor relationships, while an external partner provides the service desk, out-of-hours cover, monitoring and specialist skills. The internal team sets direction; the partner absorbs ticket volume, night shifts and project peaks, and supplies depth the group could not justify hiring.
Where an in-house team genuinely wins
**Depth of knowledge about your own estate.** Someone four years into your group knows that site 14's EPOS server is in the cellar and which GM reboots a switch rather than raising a ticket. That knowledge transfers slowly.
**Immediate physical presence.** An IT manager already on site fixes a till in four minutes: no dispatch, no travel, no ticket. For a flagship property doing heavy covers, that has real value.
**Cultural fit.** Someone who eats in the venues, knows the head chefs and understands pre-service pressure gets better information faster than any external desk.
**Control of priorities.** Internal staff can be redirected instantly: no change request, no scope conversation, no argument about whether something sits inside the contract.
Where a partner genuinely wins
**24/7 cover without three shifts of salary.** A venue trading until 2am and taking deliveries at 6am needs roughly twenty hours of cover a day, seven days a week. Once holiday, sickness, training and rest are counted, that is a rota of engineers, not one IT manager with a mobile.
**Breadth across domains.** A hospitality estate spans PMS, EPOS, payment, networking, Wi-Fi, identity, endpoint, backup and security, and no individual is strong in all of them. A partner assigns a specialist per ticket, which is how [[IT infrastructure design and disaster recovery]{.underline}](about:blank) gets done properly rather than by whoever is free.
**Surge capacity for openings.** A group opening six sites a year has uneven demand: teams sized for openings are idle between them, teams sized for steady state drown during them. A partner absorbs the peak, which is why the [[critical path for a new venue opening]{.underline}](about:blank) runs as a project alongside business-as-usual support.
**Multi-territory coverage.** Once a group opens in a second time zone, in-house cover means night shifts or another hire. MicroNet Global runs a 24/7 global service desk across UK, US and UAE offices.
**Weight with vendors.** A partner supporting 745+ sites across 24+ groups carries more weight with a PMS or EPOS vendor than a ten-site operator. Escalations move faster when a named relationship sits behind them.
The comparison, dimension by dimension
| Dimension | In-house team | Outsourced | Co-managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hours covered | Working hours, plus goodwill | 24/7 by contract | Internal by day, partner overnight and weekends |
| Cost shape | Fixed payroll, rising in steps with headcount | Monthly fee, scaling per site | Smaller payroll plus per-site fee |
| Breadth of skills | Narrow but deep in your estate | Broad, specialist per domain | Both, if roles are drawn clearly |
| Escalation to vendors | Limited commercial weight | Strong, backed by estate volume | Partner escalates, internal team decides |
| Openings and projects | Competes with daily support | Dedicated project resource | Partner delivers, internal team assures |
| Compliance and audit | Depends on individual diligence | Documented process and evidence | Internal ownership, partner evidence |
| Key-person risk | High | Low | Low |
| Response to a site fault | Immediate if present, slow if not | Remote in minutes, onsite by SLA | Fastest available route |
The cost model, honestly
The comparison people usually run is one IT manager's salary against a monthly support fee. That is wrong: it sets eight hours of cover against twenty-four.
Covering 24/7 internally needs four to five engineers before holiday, sickness, training and attrition, plus supervision, out-of-hours premiums, recruitment and tooling: monitoring, ticketing, remote access and backup. Add the specialists you will still buy in. A team that genuinely covers a trading estate around the clock is a seven-figure line, not a salary.
The honest counterweight is that partner fees scale with site count. At 40 sites a per-site fee is substantial, and a group with stable technology, one territory and predictable hours may find internal delivery cheaper. What tips the balance is rarely base cost. It is what happens at 1am on a Saturday.
The decision triggers
A few variables predict which model fits, more reliably than headcount.
| Trigger | Points to in-house | Points to a partner |
|---|---|---|
| Site count | Under 10 sites, one brand | 20+ sites, or multiple brands |
| Territories | Single country, single time zone | Two or more time zones |
| Opening cadence | Occasional, well spaced | Three or more openings a year |
| Trading hours | Limited evening trade | Guest-facing 18 hours a day |
| Compliance load | Light, low card volume | High card volume, multi-jurisdiction obligations |
| Existing team | Documented, more than two people | One person, no documentation, no cover |
What co-managed looks like day to day
The internal team owns the roadmap, the budget, the vendor relationships and anything needing presence or commercial judgement. The partner owns first and second-line tickets, monitoring, out-of-hours cover, patching, backup verification and specialist workstreams such as [[cyber security]{.underline}](about:blank).
The split that fails is the one drawn by technology rather than responsibility. "Partner owns the network, we own the servers" collapses the first time a fault sits between the two. Draw it by ticket flow: everything enters the partner's desk, and defined categories route to the internal team.
Disaster recovery shows why the blend works. A group can maintain [[disaster recovery across a multi-site estate]{.underline}](about:blank) internally, but testing it at night across every site is the work that gets deferred when the same people are fixing tills.
Where MicroNet Global fits
MicroNet Global has supported hospitality since 2004 and covers 745+ sites across 24+ groups in 15+ countries, with a 24/7 service desk across UK, US and UAE offices, a 4-hour remote resolution target and an 8-hour onsite resolution target. Around 90% of network faults are resolved remotely.
In practice the arrangement is co-managed more often than fully outsourced. Across groups including Soho House, The Ivy Collection and Bill's the work is shared: where a group holds internal capability, the partner supplies the desk, the overnight cover and the project delivery around it rather than replacing it. To map that against your team, start with [[managed IT support and service desk]{.underline}](about:blank) or [[get in touch]{.underline}](about:blank).
Frequently asked questions
There is no fixed threshold, but pressure builds around fifteen to twenty sites, and sharply once a group operates in more than one territory or opens three or more sites a year. Below ten sites in a single country, a small internal team with a partner for out-of-hours cover is usually sufficient and often cheaper.
Written by the MicroNet Global team. If you are working through any of this for your own estate, the specialists here are happy to talk it through.