Managed IT services
Someone is watching it, so you don't have to
24/7 monitoring, patching, backups and a named team who already know how your systems fit together — against a response time written into the contract.
Monthly, 30 days' notice. No multi-year lock-in.
What managed IT actually buys you
A managed service means we take operational ownership of systems that are already running — monitoring them, patching them, backing them up, and being the ones who get paged when something breaks. You're buying a defined response, not a pool of hours.
The distinction that matters is proactive versus reactive. Most IT support is bought reactively: something breaks, you call someone, they bill you for the fix. That model means your supplier earns more when your systems are less reliable, which is a poor alignment of interests.
A managed retainer inverts that. We're paid the same whether or not there's an incident, so preventing them is in our interest as much as yours. That's why monitoring, patching and backup testing are included rather than billed as extras.
Break-fix or managed?
Both are legitimate. Which is right depends on how much downtime actually costs you.
| Break-fix (pay per incident) | Managed retainer | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay | Per incident or per hour | A fixed monthly fee |
| Provider's incentive | More incidents means more revenue | Fewer incidents means less work |
| Monitoring | Usually none — you notice first | Continuous, we notice first |
| Patching & backups | Billed separately, often deferred | Included and scheduled |
| Response time | Best effort, subject to availability | Contractual, by priority |
| Best for | Low-stakes systems, tight budgets | Anything where downtime costs real money |
If an hour of downtime costs you less than the monthly retainer, break-fix is genuinely the rational choice and we'll say so.
What we manage
Systems we built, systems someone else built, and systems nobody remembers building.
Applications
Your custom software and business applications — uptime, performance, error monitoring, and fixes for the issues that surface in production.
Cloud & servers
Infrastructure across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or our own platform: capacity, patching, certificates, DNS and the configuration drift nobody tracks.
Databases
Backups with tested restores, performance tuning, connection management and the slow-query problems that only appear under real load.
Security operations
Patch management, vulnerability monitoring, access reviews and log retention — the ongoing half of the work our security practice starts.
Websites & e-commerce
Uptime, CMS and plugin updates, SSL renewal, performance monitoring and the checkout paths that must never quietly break.
Messaging & integrations
Delivery monitoring for SMS and WhatsApp traffic, failed-message queues, and the integrations between your systems that fail silently otherwise.
What's in the retainer
Everything below is included at every tier. Only the response times and the change budget differ.
Watching
- 24/7 uptime monitoring
- Error and performance alerting
- Certificate & domain expiry
- Capacity and cost trends
Maintaining
- OS and dependency patching
- Scheduled backups
- Quarterly restore tests
- Log retention
Responding
- Incident response to SLA
- Root-cause write-ups
- Named engineers who know your estate
- Shared channel, not a ticket portal
Improving
- Monthly service review
- A change budget for small work
- Documentation kept current
- Roadmap of known risks
Larger changes are quoted as projects. We won't quietly absorb them into the retainer and then run out of capacity for your incidents.
How we take something over
Four weeks from signature to full responsibility. We don't accept an SLA on a system we haven't understood.
Discovery
What exists, how it connects, where the credentials live, and what has broken before. Almost always finds something undocumented and load-bearing.
Stabilise
Fix what's already broken or unmonitored: missing backups, expired certificates, unpatched systems, absent alerting. Quoted separately if it's substantial.
Instrument
Monitoring, alerting and runbooks in place, tuned so alerts mean something. An alert nobody acts on trains everyone to ignore all of them.
Take the pager
The SLA starts. Monthly service reviews begin, with an honest account of what happened and what we're doing about the recurring causes.
FAQ
Managed services questions
Do you only manage systems you built?
No — taking over someone else's estate is a large part of this practice. It starts with a discovery and stabilisation phase, because we won't put an SLA on something we don't understand. If we find serious problems, you get that assessment honestly before committing to a retainer.
What does it cost?
It's priced on the size and criticality of the estate and the response times you need. A handful of applications with business-hours response is a modest monthly figure; a large estate with 15-minute P1 response across nights and weekends is meaningfully more. You'll get a number after discovery, not before.
Are we locked in?
No. Retainers are monthly with 30 days' notice. Everything we manage runs in your accounts with documentation and credentials you already hold, so leaving is a notice period rather than an extraction project. We'd rather keep clients because the service is good.
What happens during a major incident?
Our on-call engineer acknowledges within the SLA, works the incident with a defined escalation path, and keeps you updated on a schedule rather than waiting for you to ask. Afterwards you get a written root-cause analysis and the changes we're making. Not a ticket marked resolved.
Can you work alongside our internal IT team?
Often the best arrangement. Common splits are us taking infrastructure and out-of-hours while your team handles applications and users, or us covering specialisms you don't have in-house. The important thing is writing down who owns what — ambiguity is what causes things to fall between teams.
Is this the same as an AMC?
A traditional AMC usually covers reactive repair against a fixed annual fee. This is proactive: continuous monitoring, scheduled patching and tested backups, with contractual response times by priority. The aim is that you have fewer incidents, not faster billing for them.
Related services
What keeps you up at night?
Tell us what's running and what would hurt most if it stopped. We'll come back with a scope, an SLA and a monthly number.