Jay Did "How many workstations before you should outsource IT?" The question comes up often, and it is the wrong one. The number of workstations determines nothing. What matters is what one hour of downtime costs you.
The calculation nobody runs
Take your annual revenue and divide it by the number of hours actually worked in the year. You get a rough value for one hour of activity. Then multiply by the number of people unable to work when a system goes down.
For a twenty-employee business turning over 400 million CFA francs, one hour of full downtime easily represents 200,000 CFA francs of lost value. Half a day per quarter puts you above three million a year — not counting customers who do not come back.
Compare that figure to the cost of a managed IT contract. The decision often becomes obvious, and it does not depend on how many computers you own.
What the term actually covers
"Managed IT" means very different things depending on the provider. Three levels are common:
Monitoring only. The provider watches your systems and alerts you when something breaks. Useful, but you do the fixing. A contract at this level does not reduce your downtime, only your detection time.
Monitoring with intervention. The provider detects and fixes. This is the level that genuinely affects availability, and the one to aim for on a production system.
Full delegation. The provider also handles evolution: updates, version upgrades, capacity, security. Relevant when you have no internal technical team, or when it should focus on your business rather than infrastructure.
Three questions to ask a provider
What exactly do you guarantee? A "99.9%" availability commitment without a definition of what counts as downtime is worthless. Ask how it is measured, by whom, and what triggers a penalty.
What is the response time outside business hours? Most serious incidents happen at night, at weekends or during holidays. A contract covering only office hours protects your infrastructure precisely when it is least used.
What happens if we leave? This is the most revealing question. A good provider has a documented exit procedure: handover of access, configurations and backups. A provider who dodges this question is locking you in.
What should never be outsourced
Two things must stay with you, whatever the contract says.
Ownership of access. Administrator accounts for your domains, hosting and services must be in your name, with your recovery details. The provider receives delegated access, not ownership. We have seen companies lose their domain name because it was registered under a provider who then disappeared.
Knowledge of your own system. Insist on up-to-date infrastructure documentation, readable by a third party. If your provider is the only one who knows how your system works, switching becomes impossible — and the renewal price will reflect that.
The right moment
There is no universal threshold. But three signals say it is time: you learn about outages from your customers rather than your tools; security updates keep being postponed for lack of time; and one single person in the company knows how everything works.
That last point is the most serious. It is not a technical problem, it is a business risk.