What is Co-Management?
The Financial services industry might be adopting financial cloud technology, but seldom is a firm ready to abandon their IT department when adopting a service provider. The transition between an in-house infrastructure and the cloud requires careful planning. Moreover, adjusting to the cloud for any organization and its employees is also difficult and requires training and readjustments, especially with remote work environments becoming more common.
Those are a few issues co-managed IT solves. Co-management means a cloud provider works with the firms’ existing in-house IT department. If you’re a firm looking to build on top of your current IT department, co-managed IT augments your current team and fortifies it.
It’s preferable to adopt a flexible and adaptable solution that combines what is familiar with the benefits of a cloud-centered environment. This gives your firm a costumed solution specifically tailored to meet your needs and upgrade at a pragmatic pace. This means not only technical support for financial services, but a team that provides comprehensive solutions at scale for the firm.
How Co-Management Can Help Your Firm Grow
As a smaller firm grows, their IT departments are strained by increased demand. Co- managed solutions allow support and guidance when making strategic decisions about the firm’s network and systems. Conversely, if your firm has a skilled team of IT professionals but lack the resources, time or bandwidth for troubleshooting and smaller IT-related tasks, then co-managed solutions may be right for you.
Small financial services companies without sufficient resources will often task an overburdened member of the IT team to support users, handle contracts, maintain client relationships etc. This solution might be a quick fix but it is unsustainable in the long-term.
Because of this, internal IT departments often struggle. However, co-management provides firms with supplemental resources and outside expertise. Furthermore, there are key benefits to adopting a co-managed IT solution. For example, if your financial firm has reached a period of rapid growth and needs to adjust the scale of IT services to support internal growth. Or a company has a reliable, well-established IT staff in-house but need solutions for remote branches in other locations.
Benefits of Co-Managed IT Solutions
• Increased productivity: A co-managed approach supplies IT support around the clock, even when your in-house staff is unavailable. This can lead to reduced downtime and as a result, increase productivity.
• On-Demand expertise: When your in-house IT team runs into issues that they’re not prepared for, a co-managed service provider is there to provide assistance and back-up.
• Increased Security: With a co-managed model, the service provider accesses and gives access to the latest technology. The partnering IT staff comes in with certifications and experience that are important in creating a security strategy.
In a co-managed IT model, your IT partner identifies and fills gaps in your team availability and skill set while increasing bandwidth. A co-managed service model is created to support financial services organizations that already have IT departments, but are looking to increase their efficiency and upscale their work capabilities. And for a financial services company, co-management entails your partner knows IT compliance. FINRA compliance among other, is essential to a successful co-managed IT model for a financial firm.
Hopefully, you understand what Co-management entails and what kind of problems it solves. If you’re still confused, let’s review.
Co-Management Means Protection & Security
The goal of any co-managed IT team is to increase the abilities of the current staff. At the same time, assisting with:
• Hardware
• Data Protection
• Software
• Cloud computing
• Cloud Security
• Multi-factor functionality
With cybercriminals increasing their efforts to infiltrate financial institutions of all types, firms that adopt a proactive protection with a co-management service will be better off. Co-management for financial firms means security and compliance are at the forefront of cyber security.
Companies are can freely choose the types of solutions they prefer to keep in house and which ones to outsource to an outside IT team with co-management services. To read and learn more about Co-Managed financial cloud solutions, cybersecurity, compliance and more, visit our website.
