How Co-Managed IT Reduces Internal IT Burnout (and Keeps Your IT Person)

Co-managed IT reduces internal IT burnout by giving your IT person a team behind them. An outside provider picks up after-hours coverage, vacation backup, security work and projects, so your person stops carrying the whole environment alone. That’s the core idea behind co-managed IT, and it’s a different conversation from outsourcing.

I’m Adam Bowles, Partner and CEO at ACT360. If you run an Ontario business with 20, 50 or 100 staff and one or two people holding IT together, this post is about keeping them, and keeping them functional.

IT burnout in a small team looks like an IT person who is always reachable, rarely takes real time off, keeps postponing security and project work, and has started answering requests more slowly or more curtly than they used to.

Burnout here means the long-run exhaustion that comes from carrying more work and responsibility than one person can sustain. In a one- or two-person IT department, the signs tend to show up in the business before anyone names them:

• Vacation gets cancelled, shortened or spent checking email
• The project list never moves. The file server migration has been “next quarter” for a year.
• Security tasks, such as reviewing admin accounts or answering the insurer’s questionnaire, keep slipping
• Small requests take longer, and the tone in replies gets shorter
• Your IT person mentions, half joking, that nobody else knows how anything works
• They start asking about training budgets or job titles. Sometimes that’s ambition. Sometimes it’s an exit plan.

None of these prove burnout on their own. Three or four together are worth a direct, private conversation.

Internal IT people burn out mainly because there’s no one behind them. They’re on call around the clock, they can’t fully step away, and security and project work pile on top of daily support. The workload grows with the business while the team stays the same size.

The research on IT and security staff points the same way. In the 2025 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study (16,029 respondents worldwide, surveyed July and August 2025), 48% said they feel exhausted from trying to keep up with threats and technologies, 47% said they often feel overwhelmed by their workload, and 32% said they feel overworked because of staffing and skills shortages. Those are security professionals, not general IT, and the study doesn’t break out Canada. But anyone who has been the only IT person at a 40-person company will recognize the pattern.

A vendor survey from Sophos (5,000 IT and cybersecurity professionals in 17 countries) found 76% had experienced cyber fatigue or burnout at least occasionally in 2024. Treat that one as a vendor number, but it’s in line with the rest.

In smaller businesses, four pressures do most of the damage:

1. Always on call. The phone rings at 11 p.m. on a Saturday because the second shift can’t print.
2. No real time off, because there’s no one to cover.
3. Security keeps growing, and it’s never urgent until it is.
4. Projects get squeezed into evenings, because the daily tickets fill the workday.

When a burned-out IT person leaves, you lose knowledge nobody wrote down, face a hard hire, and run without IT coverage in the meantime. The replacement cost is rarely the salary. It’s the gap.

The salary side is easy to look up. Job Bank lists a median of $47.00 an hour for information systems specialists in Ontario and $33.00 an hour for user support technicians (2023 to 2024 wage data). At 2,080 hours, that’s roughly $98,000 and $69,000 a year before benefits.

The harder costs are these:

• What walks out the door. Admin passwords, vendor contacts, why the firewall rule exists, which PC can’t be rebooted mid-run.
• The search itself. ICTC reported that about one in six cybersecurity job postings in Canada go unfilled (2022). More broadly, a 2025 CFIB survey found 69% of small and medium-sized businesses named a shortage of qualified candidates as their main hiring obstacle, across all roles.
• The weeks in between, when nobody owns IT and every problem becomes the owner’s problem.

Plenty of businesses have already decided one person can’t carry it. Statistics Canada found that 50% of Canadian businesses had cyber security employees in 2023, down from 61% in 2021, and among those without, the most common reason was using consultants or contractors instead (47%).

Co-managed IT reduces burnout by moving specific loads off your IT person: after-hours alerts, vacation coverage, security hardening and project work. They keep daily support and the systems they know best, and the split is written down so nothing drifts back onto them.

The written part matters. Without it, an outside team becomes one more inbox your IT person has to manage, and that adds stress instead of removing it. Our post on what co-managed IT looks like day to day shows how the split runs week to week once it’s in place.

Start with your IT person, not the provider. Find out which work is wearing them down, check that your environment is ready for a second team, write the split down, then hand off one piece at a time and review it each quarter.

1. Talk privately with your IT person about what’s wearing them down, before contacting any provider.
2. List the work they’d hand off tomorrow, starting with after-hours alerts and vacation coverage.
3. Run a readiness check on admin accounts, documentation and tools so handoffs don’t stall.
4. Write down who owns what, including nights, weekends and the escalation path.
5. Hand off one piece at a time over the first few months, not all at once.
6. Review the split every quarter and ask your IT person directly whether it’s working.

Step three is the one that can stall everything, for example when every admin account sits with one person. Our co-managed IT checklist walks through the seven areas to check before an outside team joins.

If you employed 25 or more people in Ontario on January 1, you need a written policy on disconnecting from work, and your IT person is covered by it like anyone else. The law doesn’t say what the policy must allow, but a policy your IT person can never actually follow isn’t much of one.

Under the Employment Standards Act, employers that employ 25 or more employees on January 1 of a year must have the written policy in place before March 1 of that year. The ESA leaves the content to the employer and doesn’t create a new right to ignore work. This isn’t legal advice, so check your own policy with your HR adviser or lawyer.

Here’s the practical problem. If your policy says staff can switch off after 6 p.m., but your only IT person is the after-hours escalation for every system, the policy doesn’t apply to them in any real sense. Moving after-hours coverage to an outside team is often what makes the policy true for IT too.

Co-managed IT won’t fix pay that’s out of line with the market, a manager who second-guesses every decision, or an IT person who has already decided to leave. It fixes workload and coverage, not everything that causes burnout.

Be honest about which problem you have.

• If the issue is pay or recognition, adding a provider won’t change how your IT person feels about either.
• If they’ve already given notice, use the remaining weeks to document what they know, then look at fully managed IT, where the provider owns the whole environment.
• If IT was never really their job, and they’re the controller or office manager who inherited it, the kinder move is to take IT off their plate entirely. Our comparison of MSP vs in-house IT in Ontario covers that decision.
• If the business really needs a senior IT leader, more hands won’t help. Our post on vCIO vs IT manager looks at that gap.

You’ll know it’s working when your IT person takes a week off without being called, after-hours alerts go to the outside team first, and projects that stalled for months start moving. Ask them directly at each quarterly review.

Watch for these in the first two quarters:

• Vacation that actually happens, uninterrupted
• Fewer late-night messages from your IT person
• Security items closed, not just listed
• A project finished that had been “next quarter” for a year
• A different tone. Hard to measure, easy to notice.

If none of that shifts after a couple of quarters, the split is probably wrong. Revisit it with your IT person rather than adding more scope.

Our co-managed IT is built as backup for your internal hire, not a replacement. In practice:

• A named contact, Jeffrey Bowles or me, who works directly with your IT person instead of through a generic queue.
• After-hours and vacation coverage, so your internal hire isn’t a single point of failure.
• Specialized project work your person doesn’t have time for: migrations, security hardening and vendor negotiations.
• Quarterly reviews of the split, and a path to full managed IT later if your needs change.

Co-managed engagements are scoped to the gap being filled and confirmed at the assessment. If you’re in Simcoe County, see how this works on our page for co-managed IT in Barrie. For the bigger-picture case, our older post on why business leaders are embracing co-managed IT covers the shift toward selective outsourcing.

Your IT person probably won’t tell you they’re burning out. They’ll tell you the project slipped again, or that they’ll check in from the cottage. Take that as the signal.

If you want to see which loads could come off their plate, book a free IT Readiness Assessment. We’ll sit down with you and your IT person, look at what they handle well and where they need backup, and tell you whether co-managed IT fits. You can also call 705-739-2281 or email [email protected].