How many IT staff does a company need per employee?

Most mid-market organizations run between one IT staff member per 30 employees and one per 100. Where you land depends on how much of your stack is cloud-hosted rather than self-managed, how technical your users are, and how much work has already been outsourced. Treat it as a budgeting starting point, not a measure of whether you are properly covered.

What is a good IT-to-employee ratio?

There is no single correct figure. Cloud-heavy professional services firms with non-technical users often sit around one IT person per 60 to 100 employees, while manufacturers and regulated businesses typically need one per 30 to 50 because of plant systems, shift work, and audit overhead. The more useful question is how many of your operating hours are actually covered by scheduled staff.

Do mid-market businesses really need 24/7 IT coverage?

If your business operates outside standard hours, or if you carry cyber insurance, then yes in practice. Attackers deliberately target evenings, weekends, and holidays because response is slowest then, and insurers increasingly ask you to evidence monitoring rather than describe it. Genuine round-the-clock coverage takes four to six dedicated people, which is why it is almost always bought rather than staffed internally.

Is it cheaper to hire another IT person or to outsource?

It depends entirely on which gap you are closing. If the gap is ticket volume during business hours, hiring is usually the right answer. If the gap is overnight monitoring or security detection and response, hiring rarely works at mid-market scale, because properly staffing those functions requires more headcount than the workload justifies.