Day-to-day operations
After-Hours and Weekend Cover
An internal IT person is on call whether anyone agreed to it or not, because there's nobody else to call.
We take the hours your team isn't working. Alerts and calls come to us, and the person who would otherwise have answered gets the evening back. This is part of our co-managed IT services, where we work alongside your internal staff.
After-hours cover is usually the first piece of a co-managed arrangement. It's the hardest thing for one person to provide and the easiest to hand over cleanly, and it changes very little about how your team works during the day.
What we can do at 2 a.m. depends on what's written down, so shared documentation goes in first. Cover without a record of your environment means someone working on your systems without knowing how they're built.
We wrote more about this in when your IT person needs a team behind them. If you're weighing the whole arrangement, co-managed IT for in-house teams explains how it starts.
What We Include in After-Hours and Weekend Cover
- Cover outside your team's working hours, on the boundary you set.
- Alerts routed to us, so they stop waking your IT person at night.
- Agreed criteria for what we act on overnight and what waits until morning.
- A written handover each time, so your team starts the day knowing what happened.
- Holiday and sick-day cover, arranged in advance.
In their words
Questions About After-Hours and Weekend Cover
Do you take over completely at 5 p.m.?
Only if that's what you want. Some clients hand over everything after hours. Others keep their own person as the escalation point behind us for a short list of systems. Both work, as long as the arrangement is written down.
What can you do without knowing our systems?
Less than we can once we know them, which is why documentation comes first. With a current record of your environment, we can troubleshoot and fix problems after hours, and your team only hears about what needs them.
Part of Co-Managed IT Services
A team behind the IT person you already have, so a vacation or a specialist project doesn't leave the business exposed.