Managed IT & support
Day-to-day operations for the systems your business runs on, with response times written into the contract and documentation kept current — so you are never locked in by our knowledge of your own infrastructure.
Two ways managed IT goes wrong
The first is reactive support dressed up as managed service: nothing happens until you raise a ticket, so you are paying a monthly fee for the privilege of reporting your own outages. Patching slips, backups fail silently, and the first anyone knows is when a restore is needed.
The second is quieter and more expensive. The provider does the work but writes nothing down. Passwords live in their password manager, infrastructure exists only in their heads, and switching providers means reconstructing your own environment from scratch. The lock-in is not contractual, it is informational.
Both are avoidable. Proactive monitoring catches most problems before a user does, and documentation that lives in your systems rather than ours means leaving is a decision rather than a project.
What is included
Proactive monitoring
Availability, capacity, certificate expiry, backup success and error rates, alerting before users notice. Most incidents we handle are ones you never hear about.
Patch management
Operating systems, dependencies and firmware on a defined schedule, with security patches expedited and a tested rollback for the ones that go wrong.
Backup and recovery
Automated backups with periodic restore tests. Untested backups fail exactly when you need them, and the test is what makes the service worth paying for.
Identity and access
Onboarding and offboarding, single sign-on, multi-factor enforcement and access reviews. Offboarding in particular is where most organisations quietly carry risk.
Helpdesk
A route to a person who can actually fix things, with response times by severity agreed in advance rather than pointed at afterwards.
Documentation you own
Runbooks, network and system inventory and credentials in your own password manager, kept current as part of the service.
What we manage
Chosen per project, not by habit. If your team already runs something that works, we use it.
- Infrastructure
- cloud accounts
- virtual machines and containers
- networking
- DNS and certificates
- Applications
- line-of-business systems
- databases
- internal tooling
- integrations
- Identity
- Microsoft 365
- Google Workspace
- SSO providers
- MFA enforcement
- Endpoints
- device management
- patching
- endpoint protection
- disk encryption
How support engagements run
We start by finding out what you actually have. Almost every onboarding turns up something surprising — an unmonitored server, a backup that has been failing for months, an admin account belonging to someone who left.
- 01
Discovery
A full inventory of systems, access and dependencies, plus a written risk assessment. Frequently the most valuable part of the first month.
- 02
Stabilise
Monitoring deployed, backups verified by restoring them, urgent risks closed, documentation written.
- 03
Operate
Ongoing monitoring, patching, support and access management against the agreed response times.
- 04
Review
A regular written review of incidents, risks and recommendations — not a green dashboard, an actual assessment of what needs attention.
Common questions
What are your response times?
Tiered by severity and agreed before signing. A production outage and a cosmetic issue do not warrant the same commitment, and any provider quoting one number for everything is describing marketing rather than operations.
Do you provide 24/7 cover?
For production systems on the appropriate tier, yes. Many clients need out-of-hours cover for a defined critical subset rather than everything, which costs considerably less. We will help you work out which systems genuinely justify it.
Can you work with our existing IT team?
Commonly, yes — handling infrastructure and out-of-hours cover while your internal team handles users and applications, or the reverse. The split is defined in writing so nothing sits in the gap between us.
What happens if we want to leave?
You take your documentation, credentials and infrastructure and go, with a transition period included. Everything is already in your accounts and your password manager, so there is nothing to extract from us.
How is this priced?
A monthly retainer based on the number of systems and users and the response tier you need, agreed after discovery. We do not price per ticket — it creates an incentive to fix symptoms rather than causes.
Start with a scoping call.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. If we are not the right fit we will tell you on the call rather than after a proposal.
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