<p>Outsourcing IT support in the UK picked up sharply after 2020, but the trend didn’t start with the pandemic. It started with a spreadsheet. Specifically, the kind of spreadsheet a finance director puts together when they realise the in-house IT person costs £45,000 a year plus pension, plus training, plus the laptop they need replacing every three years — and they still can’t fix the VoIP system when it goes down on a Friday afternoon.</p>
<p>That’s the conversation I’ve had with at least a dozen business owners in the last year alone.</p>
<p>The economics are fairly straightforward. An internal IT hire in London will run you between £35,000 and £55,000 depending on experience. That gets you one person, with one skill set, who takes holidays and occasionally gets ill. A managed IT provider gives you a team — engineers, project managers, security specialists — for roughly the same monthly spend. And nobody panics when someone books two weeks off in August.</p>
<h2>Outsourcing IT Support in the UK After Brexit</h2>
<p>Brexit changed the maths for some businesses in unexpected ways. The weakened pound made offshore outsourcing — which had been the default for larger firms — less attractive overnight. If you were paying a provider in dollars or euros, your costs jumped 15-20% without any change in service. That pushed a lot of companies back toward UK-based providers, particularly in London where the density of managed service companies means prices stay competitive.</p>
<p>There’s also the data residency question. Post-Brexit, the UK operates under its own data protection framework — the UK GDPR — which mirrors the EU version but isn’t identical. The <a href=”https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/” target=”_blank”>ICO</a> has been clear that transferring personal data outside the UK requires adequate safeguards. For many small businesses, the simplest answer is to keep everything — servers, backups, support — within the UK. Outsourcing locally solves that problem without needing a lawyer to review your data transfer agreements.</p>
<p>I remember a client — or rather, a company that became a client — who’d been using an IT provider based in Eastern Europe. Solid technical work, decent price. But when they needed someone on-site to set up a new office in Shoreditch, the provider couldn’t help. They ended up hiring a freelancer from Gumtree to run the cabling. That’s the kind of gap that UK-based outsourcing fills without you having to think about it.</p>
<h2>What Good Outsourced IT Support Looks Like</h2>
<p>Not all managed providers are the same, and I’ll be honest — some are terrible. The ones that give the industry a bad name typically share a few traits: slow response times hidden behind SLA fine print, first-line support staff who just read from scripts, and a sales team that’s far more impressive than the engineering team behind them.</p>
<p>A good provider picks up the phone. That sounds basic, and it is, but you’d be surprised how many don’t. You should be able to reach a real engineer — not a call handler — within minutes for critical issues. Check whether the company has its own <a href=”https://1st-it.com/it-compliance-services/cyber-essentials-checklist/”>Cyber Essentials certification</a>. If they’re managing your security but haven’t passed the government’s own baseline assessment, that’s a red flag the size of a billboard.</p>
<p>Ask about their onboarding process too. A decent provider will audit your current setup before quoting. They’ll want to understand your network, your applications, your pain points. If someone gives you a price after a 15-minute call without looking at anything, they’re guessing.</p>
<h2>Making the Transition Without the Drama</h2>
<p>The fear most business owners have about outsourcing IT support in the UK is the transition itself. What if something breaks? What if the new provider doesn’t understand our systems? What if we lose access to something critical? These are fair concerns, but in practice, a well-managed handover takes two to four weeks and causes minimal disruption.</p>
<p>The key is documentation. Your current setup needs to be recorded — admin credentials, licence keys, network diagrams, vendor contacts. If your outgoing IT person (or provider) won’t hand this over cleanly, that’s a problem worth escalating. Under GDPR, you have the right to your own data, and that includes system configurations and access details.</p>
<p>Businesses that make the switch successfully tend to share one trait: they treat IT as a business function, not a cost centre. They ask questions about <a href=”https://1st-it.com/managed-cloud-services/”>cloud strategy</a>, about disaster recovery, about how technology can support their growth plans. That shift in mindset — from “fix what’s broken” to “help us work better” — is where outsourcing really starts paying off.</p>
<p>If you’re weighing the options, the honest answer is that outsourcing isn’t right for every business. Some organisations with complex internal systems or strict compliance requirements genuinely do need in-house teams. But for most UK SMEs — especially those with between 10 and 100 staff — a managed provider gives you better coverage, faster response, and fewer headaches. Whether that’s worth exploring depends on how many Fridays you’ve spent watching your IT person Google error codes.</p>