For the majority of organisations below a certain size employing a dedicated IT resource can not be justified not only a financial basis but also given expected utilisation and as such it is more attractive to work closely with a third party to ensure the effective management and operation of your network. Even where the employment of an individual can be justified on a financial basis it is often more effective to work with a specialist provider who have:

Focus – with IT an increasingly critical business requirement, the effective management of internal IT staff is essential. However, their management is often not a primary skill within organisations. Given the combination of these two factors, the best approach for maintaining the uptime of your network is to outsource it to a specialist IT Services Provider that is accountable to you at all times;
Cost – companies can often not justify a full time member of staff to manage their IT networks partly because of their cost but also as their time will not be fully utilised;
Depth – the complexity of IT networks is increasing with multiple suppliers and applications to manage and support. The depth of knowledge and experience required is significant and training any individual(s) is not cost effective when compared with outsourcing to a focused service provider who support multiple networks with a standard set of applications and have engineers who specialise in specifics elements of a network.  A focused IT Supplier can provide any client with a depth of knowledge beyond the ability of any single individual;
Service level agreements – with a third party it is also possible to negotiate service levels that ensure that any service level is delivered within a specific and agreed framework.
Risk –  working with a third party can help mitigate the risk - ensuring
Accountability – working with a managed IT service provider also leads to arguably a higher degree of accountability than might be achieved with in house resource; 
Management – employing and managing an IT manager is not always straightforward, particularly given the associated employment costs and within the confines of the current employment legislation; 
Motivation – motivation of in house staff is also very difficult particularly if you only have one or two internal IT staff, as they are unlikely to fit into any particular team;
Strategy – deciding on what systems will help you deliver your overall strategy and drive productivity is critical. An managed IT supplier will have not only the Often with in-house IT staff, it is them telling you what you need in terms of technology and having to find the budget without properly researching alternative options.  At Backbone, we have the experience of similar projects across the rest of our client base, the technical depth and but also the commercial understanding to enable this within given financial budgets; 
Emergency cover – with a single individual managing your network, businesses are left exposed when internal IT resources are away from the office (holiday, training, sickness etc) and have no cover to support them.  We offer a Keyman cover policy to support you in this situation;
Additional resource –  IT resource is expensive and often, if in house scarse in numbers but high level and expensive to try and cater for the lack of depth.  Given this assumption, their time be better spent investigating large strategic “wins” for the business and not worrying about the day to day maintenance of the systems and support of the users:  leave that to us!