Day-to-day operations
Managed IT Services
Most companies with 9 to 99 employees don't have an IT department. They have whoever is best with computers, fixing problems on top of their real job. Managed IT services hand that work to a team whose job it is.
Signs Your Business Needs Managed IT Services
When nobody owns your technology, every problem becomes an interruption for whoever is sitting closest to it.
If any of these describe your business, this service is usually the right place to start.
- You have between 9 and 99 employees and no full-time IT staff.
- Your IT is handled by one person who is very good and very busy.
- You pay several vendors, and none of them owns the whole picture.
- Something broke recently and kept people from working for longer than it should have.
Benefits of Managed IT Services
- Your staff stop losing hours to problems nobody owns.
- One number to call, answered by people who already know your systems.
- Work that used to land on whoever sat nearest becomes somebody's actual job.
- One monthly bill for support, with projects quoted separately before any work starts.
Our Approach to Managed IT Support
We act as the IT department you haven't needed to hire. Your staff call our service desk directly, so nobody on your team spends an afternoon rebuilding a laptop when they should be doing the job you hired them for.
Behind the service desk, the routine work runs every day. Patching, backups, monitoring and license management happen whether or not anybody asks, and that's the work that keeps small problems from stopping a working day.
You also get a person who knows your business well enough to plan with you. Once a quarter we sit down with you to go over what's aging and what replacing it will cost, so a server replacement is planned and budgeted well before the old one fails.
What Our Managed IT Services Include
A service desk your staff call directly
Your people reach someone who already knows your systems, by phone or through the client portal if they prefer it. Our service desk and user support page has the details.
Monitoring and maintenance
Patching and health checks for every server, workstation, laptop and network device, running continuously in the background. See monitoring and maintenance for what we watch.
Backup and recovery
Your data is backed up on a schedule we agree with you, and we test that restores actually work. Backup and business continuity covers recovery planning in more depth.
Documentation you own
What you have and how it's configured, written down and kept current so your business doesn't depend on one person's memory.
Vendor coordination
We deal with your software vendor, your internet provider, your phone carrier and your copier company, so you aren't stuck refereeing between them. Our post on what six IT vendors actually cost you explains why that matters.
Quarterly planning
A working conversation about what's aging out and what it will cost, kept as a technology roadmap you can budget against.
How Managed IT Starts, Step by Step
- We document what you haveEvery workstation, server, account and network device, plus what depends on what. You keep that document whether or not you hire us, because you should own a map of your own environment. Our post on what a methodical IT onboarding looks like walks through this stage.
- We fix what's urgent and plan the restSome findings need doing now, and some are projects to plan properly. We separate the two in front of you, so you can see what each one costs before you approve it.
- We take over the day-to-dayMonitoring, patching, backups and the service desk your people call. Your staff contact us directly, so you don't have to relay anything.
- We review it with you every quarterWe go over what broke and what's aging, then agree on what to do next. That review happens on a schedule, before something has already gone wrong.
Managed IT Alongside an Internal IT Person
Plenty of our clients do have someone internal. We pick up the after-hours load and the larger projects, so that person stops being a single point of failure and gets time for the work only they can do.
That arrangement is co-managed IT. If nobody owns your IT at all, when nobody owns your IT describes how fully managed support usually starts.
If you're unhappy with the provider you have, switching from your current MSP explains what a move involves. Our managed IT clients include construction companies and nonprofits, among others.
In their words
Related Case Studies
A nonprofit client
Twenty Years, One Church
Two Decades of Right-Sized IT for a Congregation, from a Hand-Built Computer to the Cloud
Read the case studyA construction client
Six Vendors, Multiple Invoices, and Nobody in Charge
Consolidating Six Technology Vendors into One Managed IT Partner
Read the case studyManaged IT Services FAQ
How much do managed IT services cost?
Managed IT is priced per device, per server, per network and per user, so the figure follows the size and setup of your business. There are no package tiers. We work out the number after we've looked at what you have, and you know it before the month starts.
We'll also price it against what you pay across all your current vendors, which is usually the more revealing comparison. How to read your IT invoice shows what that bill should contain.
Do we have to replace everything to start?
No. We document what you have before we change anything. Some of it will be fine and some will be near the end of its life, and you'll get a plain list of which is which and what we'd do about it. You decide the order and the pace.
What happens to our current IT person?
That's your call, and both answers are common. Some clients move that person back into the work they were hired for. Others keep them on IT, and we work alongside them. We'll tell you honestly which one we think fits.
How is this billed?
Through a monthly agreement, priced per device, per server, per network and per user. You know the number before the month starts. Project work sits outside it and is quoted separately, so nothing appears on an invoice that you didn't agree to first.
What if we only need help sometimes?
Then a full agreement is probably the wrong purchase, and we'll say so. The model works because the preventive work happens every day. Paying us only to show up after something breaks buys you the expensive half and none of the useful half.
Often paired with
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