Co-Managed IT Support in London
When your head office sets the standard and your London team needs someone on the ground, we're the local IT function that bridges the two: responsive, in the right time zone, and working to your policies rather than around them.
20+ years supporting London businesses
76% of tickets resolved the same day
Average human response under 5 minutes
Co-managed works in two situations. We're built for both
Both start from the same place: IT is already being handled somewhere, and what's missing is capable, accountable delivery on the ground in London.
Your head office is elsewhere. Your people are in London.
IT strategy, tooling and policy sit with head office, often in another country and several time zones away. But your London team is here, often senior, often client-facing, and with high expectations of how quickly things get fixed.
We become the local IT function. We follow your organisation’s standards, work within your tools, and escalate to head office properly when it’s warranted. What your London office gets is someone in the building’s time zone who knows their names, understands their working day, and represents them back to head office.
You are an IT manager, and you're at capacity.
Your internal team knows the environment and owns the strategy. They’ve simply run out of hours. Day-to-day support, monitoring, patching, joiners and leavers all consume the time that should be going into projects and planning.
We take the operational load so your team can do the work only they can do, with senior engineers available for escalation and specialist input when it’s needed.
What co-managed IT support actually means
Co-managed IT support means an external provider works alongside your existing IT function rather than replacing it. Responsibilities are divided deliberately. Strategy, policy and global standards stay where they already sit, while day-to-day operational delivery moves to a partner with people in the right place.
At Ratcliff IT, that division is explicit from the outset.
You keep:
We take on:
Our role is to bridge global strategy with local execution, making sure your UK team gets responsive, high-quality support in their own time zone while every action stays aligned to head office standards.
We don’t set your strategy, and we won’t try to. What we will do is share what we see. We work across a lot of environments, and where we spot a risk, a gap or a better way of doing something, you’ll hear it, as an observation and a recommendation, for you to decide on.
We’re not a supplier at arm’s length.
You keep:
We take on:
Our role is to bridge global strategy with local execution, making sure your UK team gets responsive, high-quality support in their own time zone while every action stays aligned to head office standards.
We don’t set your strategy, and we won’t try to. What we will do is share what we see. We work across a lot of environments, and where we spot a risk, a gap or a better way of doing something, you’ll hear it, as an observation and a recommendation, for you to decide on.
We’re not a supplier at arm’s length.
Someone here, for the people who are here
A London office running on support from another continent works until it doesn't. Tickets go into a queue that opens as your day ends. The person picking it up has never met anyone in the building. Nothing is technically wrong, and yet the office spends a lot of its time waiting.
We're in London, in your time zone, working the hours your people work. When something breaks at 9am it gets picked up at 9am, by someone who already knows your environment and knows who's asking.
That matters more than it sounds. Your London team is often the senior end of the business: fee earners, client-facing people, staff whose time is expensive and whose patience for IT problems is short. They've come from organisations where support was good. They notice when it isn't.
What being here actually gives you
The same working day
English as a first language, and the local one
Faces, not tickets
A consistent pod of engineers who get to know your environment, your processes and your standards, on site often enough to know who does what and how the office runs.
Senior engineers only, no juniors or apprentices
Everyone on the team has years of experience in the managed service provider space. That matters when they are the first line for your London office.
An advocate back to head office
When the London office needs something, we make the case for it, with the detail and evidence to support it.
Local vendors handled locally
ISPs, hardware suppliers, landlord and building matters, all dealt with by someone in the same country.
The morale point, which is rarely on the requirements list
Satellite offices know when they're an afterthought. Slow support is the most visible daily proof of it.
Good local IT support does something quietly disproportionate: it tells the London team they matter as much as head office does. We've watched that change how an office feels about itself, and it's one of the reasons head office IT leads keep us in place for years.
It was good to have a trustworthy partner to hold our hands throughout the process of transferring our IT operations.
They continue to have our best interests at heart and I am very happy with the excellent service they provide.
How it works day to day
Co-managed only works if the mechanics are agreed rather than assumed. Here's how the arrangement runs once it's live.
We're the first number your London users call
Your people contact us directly. We triage, investigate and resolve wherever it sits within our scope, which is most of it.
Your internal or head office team stops being the first line for password resets and printer problems.
Your ticketing system, ours, or both
Where you run your own platform, tickets are duplicated between systems so both sides keep full visibility. It's manual work, and we do it because a shared picture is worth more than the effort of maintaining it.
If you'd rather tickets originate in your system and come to us for triage and resolution, that works too. We agree the direction at onboarding.
Escalation done properly
Nothing comes to you until we've genuinely worked it.
When something does need to escalate, it's escalated by the engineer who worked it, not passed on by a dispatcher, and it arrives with the actions already taken, what we found, and what we'd recommend next.
The aim is that your team's involvement is rare and, when it happens, useful.
Three tiers, clearly bounded
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Local response. End-user devices, local network, approved software, day-to-day support for your UK staff.
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Head office escalation. Global systems access, policy changes, anything needing cross-region coordination.
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Vendor engagement. UK-based suppliers dealt with directly by us, global vendor matters coordinated with you.
Business-critical outages and security incidents bypass the standard queue and go straight to your designated contacts.
Your tools, and access to ours
We work within the tools head office owns, whether that's RMM, MDM, EDR, SIEM or filtering.
Where there's a gap, we can supply and manage the equivalent. Either way, we'll give your team visibility into our monitoring and network tooling, and portal access for ticket oversight, so you can see what's happening without having to ask.
Approvals that don't become bureaucracy
Change approval is agreed up front and kept light. For most things it’s as simple as copying you on a ticket and getting a reply to proceed.
Significant changes, IP changes, firmware, switch work, service accounts, always come to you first.
Staying connected, deliberately
The failure mode in co-managed arrangements isn't technical. It's drift: two teams gradually operating in parallel rather than together, until nobody's quite sure who owns what. Scheduled contact is what prevents it, so we build it in rather than leaving it to good intentions.
SLA figures on their own tell you whether we hit a number. These conversations tell you whether the service is actually working.
Where the line sits
Gaps and overlaps are what make co-managed arrangements fail. We agree the split at onboarding, document it, and review it as things change. This is the typical starting point.
Managed or monitored, stated explicitly. Where a system is managed, we own the outcome: monitoring, alerting, remediation and improvement. Where it is monitored, we provide visibility, alerts and advice while action sits with you. Which systems fall into which category is documented at onboarding and reviewed as the estate changes, so responsibility is never assumed.
What our co-managed IT support covers
One partner, one fixed monthly fee, and a defined scope agreed with you at the start.
Proactive IT Monitoring
Your team stays focused while we keep things stable in the background. Continuous monitoring of endpoints, servers, cloud systems, backups and patching, with alerts triaged and resolved before they reach your users. Regular health checks and preventative maintenance rather than waiting for something to break.
IT Support and Service Desk
Immediate local capacity for your London office. Senior engineers as the first point of contact for your UK users, resolving most issues at first touch and escalating properly when they don’t. Support across Windows and macOS, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, iOS, printers, video conferencing and your approved line-of-business applications.
Cyber Security Consultancy
Strengthening your posture without adding to your team’s workload. Where head office owns the security stack, we work within it and act as your escalation point locally. Where there are gaps, we can provide and manage endpoint detection and response backed by a 24/7 Security Operations Centre, DNS and internet filtering, SIEM, firewall management, mobile device management and security awareness training.
Strategic Consulting and Planning
Input into the decisions, without taking them from you. We contribute to planning and budgeting in line with head office direction: sharing observations from your environment, flagging risks early, and making practical recommendations that help local execution match wider organisational goals.
Cloud Services
Cloud environments configured properly and maintained properly. Migrations, continuity planning, backup and ongoing protection for Microsoft 365 and your wider cloud estate, delivered in line with your organisation’s risk profile and standards.
Project Delivery and Implementation
The local hands for work head office has planned. Office moves, infrastructure refreshes, rollouts, migrations and site setups delivered on the ground in the UK, to your specification and against a fixed scope and cost. You direct the project, we execute it locally.
AI Consultancy and Implementation
Practical AI adoption, done in the right order. Readiness assessment before rollout, because Copilot and its equivalents surface whatever your permissions and data hygiene actually are. We assess the estate, put the foundations right, then support deployment, governance and user adoption alongside your head office direction.
IT Assessments and Audits
We don’t just highlight risks, we help you resolve them. An independent assessment of the UK environment, uncovering misconfigurations, security gaps and compliance issues. Then we work with your team to act on the findings and strengthen the estate in a measurable, controlled way. A useful first step if head office wants a clear picture of the London office before anything else is decided.
Download our Cybersecurity Checklist for London businesses with 20-100 employees
Built from what we regularly find during onboarding, not generic advice. Learn how to strengthen your Microsoft 365 security with practical, standards-aligned recommendations.
Complete the form and we'll send you a copy. No spam, no pressure, no follow-up sales chase.
The work that quietly lands on everyone else
In a growing London office, a surprising amount of IT work ends up with people whose job it isn't. A new starter is confirmed, and suddenly someone in HR is chasing a laptop, someone in finance is approving a purchase, and the office manager is working out whether the machine will be ready for Monday. Nobody planned it that way. It just accumulated.
It's not that the work is difficult. It's that it's procedural, it's relentless, and it has a deadline attached every single time. Doing it properly means following the same sequence, in the same order, without missing a step, for every joiner and every leaver.
That’s exactly the kind of work that should sit with us.
Joiners
We agree a standard build with you once: specification, applications, permissions, security configuration, naming conventions.
After that, a new starter is a single approval. The device is ordered, built, configured and delivered ready for the user on their first morning. Fixed cost, known lead time, no negotiation each time.
Leavers
A leaver is a security event, not an administrative task. Accounts secured, access revoked, data preserved where it needs to be, the device collected and processed.
Handled the same way every time, on a documented process, so nothing is left open behind someone who has already gone.
Everything in between
Movers, role changes, permission changes, equipment for a new meeting room, the second monitor someone has been asking about for three weeks. The steady stream of small requests that clog up an office manager’s week.
Your HR and operations teams get their time back. Your new starters get a proper first day. And the process is documented, repeatable and auditable, which matters when head office asks how joiners and leavers are actually handled in the UK.
Service levels and coverage
Every ticket is prioritised on two questions, assessed the moment it arrives: how many people are affected, and how badly is the business impeded. A single user with an irritation and a whole floor unable to work are not the same problem, and they don’t get the same response.
That gives us four priority levels, from emergency to next-time. Each carries its own targets for acknowledgement, for a resolution plan, and for resolution itself. Emergencies get a resolution plan inside half an hour. Everything gets acknowledged in minutes, not hours.
Same-day resolution runs at 76%, and the figure is honest rather than flattering. A good deal of what comes in doesn’t need same-day: change requests, scheduled work, non-urgent requests with a date attached. We tend to clear those straight away regardless, often before another provider would have acknowledged them. What matters more is that 98% of tickets are resolved within the agreed service level, in under two calls on average.
Coverage is 08:30 to 18:00, Monday to Friday, excluding UK public holidays, which is your London office’s working day rather than a compromise between time zones. After-hours and weekend cover is available by prior arrangement.
We report against these targets monthly, in context. A ticket closed inside SLA that the user was unhappy with is not a success, which is why we track satisfaction alongside the numbers.
98% SLA Met
76% of Tickets Resolved Same Day
99% Client Retention
Average Human Response Under 5 Minutes
A person, not an auto-acknowledgement.
When I look back to three years ago, before Ratcliff IT came on board, my role was much harder than it needed to be. It was frustrating and messy. I was probably spending three hours a week, sometimes more, dealing with IT instead of doing my actual job.
Now it's completely different. Everything goes through the portal, which is great. I log in, follow the checklist for new starters, copy across what we need from our internal process, and everything just works.
One fixed fee. One invoice. No ad hoc billing
Everything described on this page, the coordination with head office, the duplicated ticket handling, the documentation, the escalation management, the meetings, is what makes a co-managed service work. It’s also, on an hourly model, all billable.
That’s the problem with hourly. Every one of those touchpoints becomes a billing event, and both sides quietly start rationing the very communication the service depends on. Your team hesitates before picking up the phone. Ours has no financial reason to prevent the problem that pays better to fix. The incentives point in opposite directions.
So we don’t do it. One inclusive monthly fee, one invoice, with the connective work built in, because the service doesn’t run without it. No pay-as-you-go, no time and materials, no unexpected bills and nothing to dispute at the end of the month.
Our interest is in preventing issues and resolving them fast. Yours is the same. A fixed fee is what keeps those aligned.
What sits outside the fee, stated plainly
Working within your stack, or filling the gaps
In most co-managed arrangements head office selects, licenses and owns the core tooling: RMM, MDM, endpoint detection and response, SIEM, internet filtering, cloud backup. That’s how it should be. Consistency across regions is the point of having a global IT function.
We work within those tools rather than around them. We deploy them correctly in the UK environment, use them as intended, and act as your escalation point locally.
Where a tool isn’t in place, or the UK office is outside its coverage, we can provide and manage the equivalent:
Who responds to what
Our own position
Nothing was too much trouble for the team at Ratcliff IT. They delivered exactly what they set out to, with no hidden or extra charges.
They knew exactly what to do to really make a difference to our business.
Our bespoke co-managed approach: what happens next
No hard sell, and no obligation at any point. Here’s how a conversation with us usually goes.
A first conversation
Half an hour, no preparation needed. You tell us how IT is currently handled, where head office sits, what’s working and what isn’t. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re a good fit, including if we’re not.
Getting to know each other
We look properly at your environment and your London office: how many people, what they do, how they work, what head office standards we’d be working to. You meet the people who’d actually be looking after you.
Working out the details
The split of responsibilities, what’s managed and what’s monitored, ticket and escalation flows, tooling, approvals, meeting cadence. This is the part that determines whether co-managed works, so we do it properly rather than quickly.
A proposal
A clear scope, a fixed monthly fee, and the onboarding project priced separately. Nothing hidden, nothing to negotiate later.
Onboarding
A structured project with defined activities: documenting your environment, deploying tooling, agreeing processes, establishing the meeting rhythm through the first 30, 60 and 90 days. By the end of it your team and ours are working as one.
Results from Ratcliff IT Clients Based in London
Read how we’ve helped businesses across London overcome IT challenges with smart solutions, smooth transitions, and ongoing support that makes a real difference day to day.
GFC Economics
GFC Economics came to us facing serious downtime that was disrupting their ability to deliver time-sensitive research reports. We carried out a full network upgrade, including a new server build, to provide a stable, reliable IT environment — all with minimal disruption to their team.
MHA
MHA London came to us needing a seamless migration to Microsoft 365 while facing network issues that were causing frequent downtime. We delivered a full migration and network upgrade, including a new firewall, managed switches and Datto business continuity protection, creating a secure and reliable IT environment with zero email downtime.
Talk to us about co-managed IT support in London
If your London office needs someone on the ground, or your IT team needs the operational load taken off them, a short conversation will tell us both whether we’re the right fit.
In a 30-minute call we’ll:
No preparation needed, and no obligation.
Frequently asked questions about co-managed IT support
The model
Co-managed IT support means an external provider works alongside your existing IT function rather than replacing it. Responsibilities are divided deliberately: strategy, policy and global standards stay with your internal or head office team, while day-to-day operational delivery sits with the partner. In our case that means being the local IT function for a London office while head office continues to set direction.
In a fully managed service we take responsibility for the entire IT function, including strategy, security policy and tooling decisions. In a co-managed service you retain all of that. We handle operational delivery: first-line and second-line support, monitoring, patching, joiners and leavers, local vendor management and project execution, within the standards you set.
You do. In a co-managed arrangement strategy, policy and standards remain entirely with your internal or head office IT function. We contribute observations and recommendations from what we see in your environment, but decisions are yours. We won’t make changes of consequence without approval.
Yes, and it’s a common arrangement. We work alongside partner MSPs as well as in-house teams. The important part is agreeing the split of responsibilities and escalation paths at the outset, which we document and review as things change.
No, though UK offices of overseas-headquartered businesses are where co-managed comes up most often. We also work with UK businesses that have their own IT manager and need the operational load taken off them so their internal team can focus on projects and planning.
How it runs
Directly, in most arrangements. We become the first point of contact for your London users, which stops your internal or head office team being the first line for day-to-day requests. If you’d prefer tickets to originate in your system and come to us for triage, that works too, and we agree the direction at onboarding.
Yes. Where you run your own platform, tickets are duplicated between systems so both sides retain full visibility. This is sometimes called a swivel-chair arrangement. It’s manual work and we do it because a shared picture is worth more than the effort of maintaining it.
It’s the practice of duplicating tickets between two systems so both parties see the same information. It exists because most co-managed arrangements involve two ticketing platforms that don’t integrate. Rather than force you onto ours or lose visibility on yours, we maintain both.
Only after we’ve genuinely worked the issue. Escalations are made by the engineer who handled the ticket rather than passed on by a dispatcher, and they arrive with the actions already taken, what we found and what we recommend next. Business-critical outages and security incidents bypass the standard queue and go straight to your designated contacts.
08:30 to 18:00, Monday to Friday, excluding UK public holidays. That’s your London office’s working day rather than a compromise between time zones. After-hours and weekend cover is available by prior arrangement at agreed rates.
Average human response is under 5 minutes, from a person rather than an automated acknowledgement. Every ticket is prioritised on how many people are affected and how badly the business is impeded, giving four priority levels each with its own targets for acknowledgement, resolution plan and resolution. Emergencies get a resolution plan inside 30 minutes.
Where a system is managed, we own the outcome: monitoring, alerting, remediation and improvement. Where it’s monitored, we provide visibility, alerts and advice while the action sits with your team. Which systems fall into which category is documented at onboarding and reviewed as your estate changes, so responsibility is never assumed.
Tools, access and security
No. Where head office owns the core tooling, whether that’s RMM, MDM, endpoint detection, SIEM or filtering, we work within it and deploy it correctly in the UK environment. Where a tool isn’t in place or the UK office falls outside its coverage, we can provide and manage the equivalent.
Yes. We provide your team with access to our remote monitoring and network monitoring tools, and portal access for ticket visibility and oversight. Access to our internal systems isn’t granted by default, though limited access can be arranged case by case with agreed scope.
It depends on who owns the tooling. Where we provide the security stack, we provide first response and investigation. Where head office owns and manages it, initial response sits with your analysts and we’re available for remediation: cleaning infected machines, resetting credentials, working with affected users. The boundary is agreed and documented before it’s needed.
Endpoint detection and response backed by a 24/7 Security Operations Centre, DNS and internet filtering, SIEM and Microsoft 365 threat detection, firewall and network device management, mobile device management with encryption, and security awareness training with phishing simulation. We’re Cyber Essentials Plus certified and GDPR compliant.
Licence procurement and management normally stays with your internal or head office team. We advise on specification, maintain documentation, and help standardise licensing practice where we can, but we don’t own the process unless specifically agreed.
Commercials and practicalities
One inclusive monthly fee, one invoice. No pay-as-you-go, no time and materials, no unexpected bills. The coordination, ticket handling, documentation, escalation management and meetings are all built in, because the service doesn’t work without them. On an hourly model every one of those becomes a billing event and both sides start rationing the communication the service depends on.
Onboarding is a defined project and chargeable. So is large-scale project delivery such as office moves and infrastructure refreshes, after-hours and weekend cover, setup of new IT equipment, specialist consultancy and training, and end-to-end procurement on your behalf. Everything is quoted and approved before work starts.
A structured project: documenting your environment and confirming what’s in and out of scope, deploying monitoring and management tooling, agreeing core processes for joiners, leavers, ticket flows and approvals, aligning roles and responsibilities, and establishing a meeting cadence through the first 30, 60 and 90 days. It’s chargeable, and it’s what makes everything afterwards run properly.
We run a structured offboarding project with an agreed plan and timeline: handover of system information and documentation, runbooks and operational guidance where appropriate, and coordinated removal of our access. Where offboarding is commissioned as a project, we hand over copies of the processes developed during the service so your team can carry on with them.
Yes. Windows and macOS, plus Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, iOS devices, printers, scanners, video conferencing equipment and your approved line-of-business applications.
Kept light by design. For most things it’s as simple as copying you on a ticket and getting a reply to proceed. Significant changes always come to you first: IP changes, firmware and switch work, service account changes, major reconfigurations. The flows are agreed at onboarding so nobody is guessing.
Monthly, and tailored to what matters to you. Ticket volumes, trends and types, workload distribution, SLA performance in context, escalation volumes, user satisfaction, and asset tracking with warranty expiry. Bespoke dashboards are available where you want them.
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