Managed IT Services vs In-House IT: Which Is Right for Your GTA Business?

For most Ontario businesses under about 20 staff, a managed IT provider (MSP) costs less and covers more than one in-house hire, because the IT workload is too small and too varied to fill one full-time role. Between roughly 20 and 75 staff, co-managed IT, an internal person plus a provider, is often the best fit. Larger firms with servers and several sites usually justify an internal team and buy specialist work in.

Headcount is only a starting point. Work out the loaded cost of a hire, the hours of real IT work you have and who covers holidays, sick days and incidents. The sections below walk through each one.

Use public wage data rather than anyone's sales pitch. Job Bank lists the Toronto Region median for a computer network technician (NOC 22220) at $35.71 an hour, with a range of roughly $18.67 to $58.24 (checked October 2026). A senior systems administrator who can also run security will sit well above the median.

Wages are only part of it. Add employer CPP and EI, Ontario's Employer Health Tax if your payroll is over the exemption, vacation, benefits, a laptop, admin tools and training. Many employers use a loaded multiplier somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 times salary. Treat that as an assumption and replace it with your payroll provider's figure.

Pull the last three months of tickets, emails to whoever fixes things, and vendor calls. Most offices under 30 people find the steady-state work is well short of a full-time job, but spiky. Projects (an office move, a Microsoft 365 migration, a laptop refresh) arrive in bursts.

If the true load is 10 to 15 hours a week, a full-time hire will either be underused or drift into other work. If it is 35-plus hours a week of genuine IT, an internal person starts to make sense.

One person means one set of holidays, one sick week and one resignation letter away from nobody knowing the passwords. It also means one skill set. A good generalist is rarely also strong on firewall configuration, Microsoft 365 security, backups and incident response.

Before you hire, decide who covers those four weeks a year and who checks the internal person's work. Without a second pair of eyes, mistakes in admin access or backups go unnoticed until they matter.

Rough guidance from what we see in Ontario offices. Complexity matters more than headcount: a 12-person law firm handling trust funds needs more than a 40-person warehouse with three shared PCs.

• Who owns the admin accounts for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the domain registrar and the firewall today? Whatever you choose, the business should own them, not a person or a vendor.
• What does your cyber insurance application require (MFA, backups, patching evidence) and who will produce that evidence?
• If your IT person left on Friday, could someone else run payroll systems on Monday?
• Which tasks need a person physically in the office, and how often?

Plenty of firms keep a capable internal person for desk-side help and pay a provider for security, monitoring, after-hours incidents and projects. That arrangement only works if responsibilities are written down. Our co-managed vs fully managed guide has a responsibility matrix you can copy.

If you are coming from pay-per-call support rather than an internal hire, the break-fix comparison is the better starting point.

Do the loaded-cost table with your own payroll numbers, count three months of real IT work, and get one written managed quote for the same scope. Put the three side by side. If you want us to sanity-check the comparison, send it over; we are staffed 24/7.