In short
- Below roughly 150 staff, one salary buys one person with one set of skills. The same money buys a team with several.
- Above that size, most businesses keep one person on staff and hire an outside company for the rest.
- The changeover is the risky part. Document everything before anybody touches anything, and read the ticket log weekly for the first ninety days.
Handing your computers to an outside company is one of the larger decisions an owner makes. Done well, you get deeper skills, better systems and a predictable monthly number. Done badly, you get a supplier who does not understand your business, answers slowly, and has nothing at stake when your Monday goes wrong.
This guide covers the whole picture. What to hand over and what to keep. How to check a provider properly. What the contract should say, and how to make the move without disrupting the office.
What the two options actually cost
Hiring in Canada in 2026 runs roughly:
- A junior technician with two or three years behind them: $55,000 to $70,000 in Toronto or Vancouver
- Someone who can run your whole environment alone: $75,000 to $95,000
- Someone who can also plan, budget and manage suppliers: $95,000 to $130,000
- Add 30 to 40 percent on top for CPP, EI, benefits, equipment and training
So a real internal IT function, rather than a part-time coordinator, costs somewhere between $100,000 and $180,000 a year before any equipment. Set that against a published monthly fee and the comparison becomes arithmetic instead of instinct: the per-person working is in what IT support costs in Canada, and the plain version of the same question is answered in how much does IT support cost.
For that money an outside company gives you several people with different specialities, cover outside office hours, and tools no single business would buy on its own. Our own monthly figures are published on the pricing page, so you can compare against a salary before you talk to anyone.
The word covers four different things
Be clear which one you are shopping for.
Everything handed over. The provider runs the help desk, the monitoring, the security, the suppliers and the planning. You employ nobody in IT.
Shared. You keep one or two people for daily support and coordination. The provider handles security, complex projects, after-hours cover, and anything your person does not do.
Project only. You run the daily work and bring in specialists for a move, a migration or a new office.
Extra hands. Your internal team stays, and outside specialists fill named gaps on a time contract.
Most growing Canadian businesses start with everything handed over and shift to shared somewhere past 75 to 100 staff.
What to hand over, and what to keep
Hand over:
- Watching the systems outside office hours. Staffing that alone is out of reach for a business of your size. A provider spreads the cost across many clients.
- Security. The threats change monthly. One internal hire cannot keep pace with detection, patching, incident response and staff training all at once.
- Updates and compliance reporting. Dull, critical, and much more reliable when it runs from one central set of tools.
- The help desk. Especially useful with several locations, remote staff, or hours that do not justify a salary.
- Big projects. Server moves, office buildouts, major software rollouts. Deep skills needed briefly.
- Supplier negotiation. A provider buying for many businesses has leverage you do not have.
Keep inside:
- Knowledge of your own software. Your practice management system, your estimating software, your production tools. That expertise usually belongs in-house.
- The person in leadership meetings who translates technology into money and back. Some providers offer this as a service; it still works better with somebody who sits in the room.
- Training your own people. Teaching staff to use the tools works better from somebody who knows the culture.
How to check a provider properly
The Canadian market holds excellent providers and a long tail of weak ones with good marketing. These questions separate them, and the longer list, with our own answers printed under each one, is in what to ask an IT company before you sign.
How many machines does each of your technicians look after? Above roughly 150 machines per technician, response times suffer. Ask what the number is now and what it was two years ago.
How many technicians left last year? Above one in five is a warning. High turnover means a stranger relearning your office every few months.
After hours: a person, or a voicemail box? "Round the clock monitoring" can mean somebody watching, or an automatic alert nobody answers until Monday. Ask which.
Walk me through the first 30 days. A mature provider has a written method: discovery, documentation, a risk assessment, a plan. Vague answers here predict vague service later.
What happens when your technician is stuck? There should be a named senior engineer and a written escalation path with times attached.
How do changes get made? New software and configuration changes should follow a written process. Emergencies happen; they should be the exception.
Do you sit down with me every quarter? Quarterly reviews are where a provider tells you what is aging, what is coming and what it will cost. A provider who does not do them is only ever reacting.
What do you use to watch my equipment, and what do you back it up with? Ask how often backups run, how long copies are kept, where the off-site copy lives, and how often somebody proves a restore works. "We use Veeam" is half an answer.
The contract
Times that matter. How fast they answer matters less than how fast the problem is gone. Ask for a written commitment on resolution, not only on first reply.
What is excluded. All-inclusive agreements usually leave out project work above a size, new user setup above a monthly allowance, hardware purchases, calling third-party vendors on your behalf, and after-hours work above a volume. Read the exclusions before you read the price.
How you leave. Fair terms let you leave on 30 to 60 days notice and take your documentation with you, in a format you can hand to somebody else. Documentation that only exists inside the provider’s own system is the most common and most legitimate complaint in this industry.
Walk away from initial terms longer than a year with a penalty attached, automatic yearly renewal with a 90-day cancellation window, or any claim of ownership over work you paid for. We publish month-to-month terms for exactly this reason.
Moving without breaking the week
The changeover is the riskiest part of the whole relationship. Handle it deliberately.
- Document everything before anyone touches anything. For a 25 to 50 person business this takes two to four weeks. Rushing it is where the pain comes from.
- Overlap if you can. Switching providers, a 30-day overlap with one winding down and one ramping up is worth the extra cost.
- Run a rehearsal. Before go-live, walk through it out loud: it is 11 pm on a Friday, the server is down, what happens now. Find the gaps before a real Friday does.
- Tell your staff exactly what changes. How to raise a ticket, what to expect, who to reach in a genuine emergency. Say it before go-live, not after.
- Watch the first 90 days closely. Review the ticket log weekly. Look at how long things took and what keeps coming back. Problems left alone in month one become permanent by month four.
How to decide
Handing IT to an outside company fits when you have more than ten staff, your work depends on the computers, an internal hire would cost more than $80,000, you carry compliance duties, or you have remote staff and more than one location. The managed IT page sets out what that looks like day to day.
Keeping it inside fits when your technology is unusual enough that outsiders keep misunderstanding it, or when the work needs somebody embedded in your operation full time.
If this decision arrived because somebody resigned, deal with the accounts first and the strategy second. The order for that week is in your IT person just quit, and the plain answer is at our IT person quit. Where we work from, including Ottawa, is under locations.
Talk it through with a person
Leave your name and number on the contact page and a real person calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour. If you would rather see the state of things first, the free infrastructure audit gives you a written picture with the gaps in priority order.
itopsi is a Toronto-based managed IT provider working with Canadian businesses.
