When businesses compare managed IT services against an internal team, they typically compare salary costs. This misses most of the real numbers.
The Hidden Costs of Internal IT
Recruitment: Finding a senior engineer costs 20–30% of their annual salary in recruiter fees, interviewing time, and onboarding.
Training and Retention: Technology skills have a half-life of 18–24 months. Continuous training costs money. And if a key person leaves, institutional knowledge walks out with them.
After-Hours Coverage: Incidents do not respect business hours. Internal teams either suffer burnout from on-call rotations or you pay expensive overtime rates.
Tooling and Licences: Monitoring platforms, security tools, backup systems, and ITSM software — these costs add up to $2,000–$8,000 per seat annually.
What Managed Services Actually Costs
A typical Aaitek managed services engagement for a 200-person business covers:
- 24/7 monitoring and incident response
- Patch management and security updates
- Helpdesk (Tier 1 and Tier 2)
- Monthly performance reporting
- Quarterly strategic reviews
Cost: $18,000–$35,000 per month, depending on complexity.
An equivalent internal capability — 3 engineers plus tooling — costs $50,000–$70,000 per month all-in when you include salaries, super, leave, recruitment, training, and tooling.
The ROI Calculation
Beyond cost: managed services typically deliver:
- 47% faster incident resolution (due to specialised team and pre-built runbooks)
- 99.9% uptime SLA vs. best-effort internal teams
- Proactive issue detection before users are impacted
- Compliance ready documentation for ISO 27001, SOC2, and GDPR
Is It Right for You?
Managed services work best when IT is not your core business differentiator — when you want the infrastructure to just work so your team can focus on what creates value for customers.
Talk to our managed services team for a free Total Cost of Ownership analysis.
