Co-managed IT services in Dubai: your IT team stays, we cover the hours and the depth they cannot.
Co-managed IT is for organisations that already have their own IT staff and want to keep them. Your team keeps the users, the business knowledge and the decisions. We take an agreed, written share of the work: 24/7 co-managed IT support outside your team’s hours, security monitoring from our Dubai-based SOC, and the specialist Microsoft work your team has no time for. Every task has one named owner, and our admin access to your tenant is limited to the roles the job needs.
- WrittenWho-does-what for every system
- 24/7Cover outside your team’s hours
- 5 minP1 critical response
- Least privilegeAdmin access to your tenant
Six things a co-managed agreement has to settle, and how we settle them.
A who-does-what for every system
A responsibility matrix covering each system, incident type and change: who is responsible, who approves, who is consulted and who is told. Typical split: your team owns users, local devices and business applications; we own security monitoring, out-of-hours cover and the Microsoft 365 and Azure work you hand over.
24/7 and out-of-hours cover
Your team works its normal hours. Nights, weekends and public holidays, tickets and alerts come to us, up to full 24/7 cover. Anything we cannot close is written up and handed back to your team at the start of their day, with what we found and what we did.
Escalation in both directions
Your engineers escalate to ours when an issue needs depth they do not have. We escalate to your named contact when a decision belongs to the business, such as shutting down a system or contacting a user’s manager. Each route has a named person, a phone number and a priority level.
One ticket queue, not two
We work inside your ticketing system and your collaboration tools wherever possible, so both teams see the same history. If you have no ticketing system, we agree one with you. A ticket is never closed by one side without the other being able to see why.
Least-privilege admin access
We do not ask for permanent Global Administrator rights. Access to your Microsoft 365 tenant is given by role, for the tasks in our scope, and you can remove it. See the access section below for how this works with Microsoft’s GDAP and Privileged Identity Management.
Security monitoring your team can see
Microsoft Sentinel and Defender alerts are watched from our Dubai-based SOC. Your team is called on real incidents, not every alert, and sees the same incident record we work from. We run Sentinel for more than 50 tenants.
How we get access without anyone holding the keys to everything.
GDAP: granular, time-bound partner access
Microsoft’s granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) give a partner least-privileged, granular and time-bound access to a customer’s workloads, and the customer must explicitly grant it. A GDAP relationship cannot be permanent: the maximum is two years. If you remove the roles or end the relationship, the partner’s security groups lose access.
No standing Global Administrator
Microsoft recommends fewer than five Global Administrators in an organisation, because the role has essentially unrestricted access. We work with narrower Microsoft Entra roles for each task, and a GDAP relationship that includes Global Administrator cannot be set to auto extend.
Just-in-time elevation with PIM
Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) lets an admin be eligible for a role and activate it only for a limited time, with approval and email notifications if you configure them. PIM requires additional licences, so we confirm what your tenant has before designing around it.
A record your auditors can read
PIM lets you download audit history for internal or external audit. Combined with the written responsibility matrix, you can show who had which admin rights, for how long, and who approved them.
Six UAE situations where keeping your team and adding ours works.
A small IT team with business-hours coverage
One to a few internal staff covering office hours, with no one watching systems overnight or at weekends.
Strong infrastructure skills, no security specialist
Your team runs the estate well but cannot staff security monitoring and incident response around the clock.
Microsoft-heavy organisations
Your team supports users; we take the deeper Entra, Intune, Defender, Purview and Sentinel work you assign to us.
A project bigger than the team
A tenant migration, a new office or a Copilot rollout that would otherwise stop day-to-day support.
Covering a vacancy or leave
Your IT lead leaves or goes on long leave. We widen our share while you recruit, then hand it back.
Building the team’s own skills
Your engineers work alongside ours on the tasks we own, so knowledge stays in the building.
Three ways to run IT, compared on the points that matter to an in-house team.
| Feature | Co-managed | Fully managed (outsourced) | In-house only |
|---|---|---|---|
Who users call first | Your team | The provider | Your team |
Business knowledge and decisions | Your team | Shared, provider-led | Your team |
Nights, weekends and public holidays | Provider, up to 24/7 | Provider | On-call rota you staff |
Security monitoring | Provider SOC | Provider SOC | Your team, or none |
Written who-does-what | Provider scope | Job descriptions | |
Provider admin rights | By role, time-bound | Set by the contract | Not applicable |
Best fit | You have IT staff and want to keep them | No IT staff, or want none | Large teams with every skill in-house |
Four steps, with nothing handed over until the split is written down.
- 1
Responsibility workshop
1-2 days
A working session with your IT lead. We list every system, recurring task and incident type, and agree which stay with your team, which come to us, and which are shared with a named lead.
- 2
Written matrix and escalation paths
1 week
The agreed split as a responsibility matrix, plus the escalation routes in both directions, the hours each team covers, and the priority definitions both sides use.
- 3
Access and tooling
1-2 weeks
Role-based admin access to your tenant, set up with your approval. We join your ticket queue and collaboration channels, connect monitoring, and test an out-of-hours escalation end to end.
- 4
Monthly reviews, adjusting the split
Ongoing
A monthly review with your IT lead: tickets each side handled, escalations, security incidents and admin access granted. Where the boundary causes friction, we change the matrix rather than work around it.
What in-house IT leads ask before co-managing.
Book a responsibility workshop and get a written who-does-what.
Tell us what your team covers today, which systems and hours need help, and where escalations go wrong. We will confirm the requirements and proposed split with you.
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