Managed IT
The day-to-day, handled before you notice it. One service desk, one monitoring platform, one patch schedule and one monthly report covering every asset you own.
Break-fix is not cheaper. It is just billed later
An hourly provider makes money when your environment misbehaves. That is not a conspiracy, it is arithmetic — and it explains why the patching never quite gets done and the documentation never quite gets written.
We are paid a fixed amount per seat per month. Every ticket we prevent is time we get back, so preventing them is the whole business model. It also means you can raise a ticket for something small without a conversation about whether it is worth the money.
What that looks like in practice: patch compliance reported monthly, an asset register that matches reality, documentation written as work happens rather than at handover, and a quarterly review where we go through the ticket data with you.
Nine things, every month, for every seat
No line items you have to ask for. If it appears here, it is in the base agreement.
- Service desk
- Unmetered support by phone, email and portal for every user. Australian-based engineers, business hours as standard and 24/7 on the Complete tier and above. Tickets are triaged, categorised and reported on — you can see what your people are actually asking for.
- Monitoring & alerting
- Agents on servers, endpoints and network devices watching disk, memory, service health, certificate expiry, backup status and hardware warnings. Alerts route to a human, not to an inbox nobody reads.
- Patch management
- Operating system and third-party application patching on a defined schedule, with a test ring before general release, a documented exception process and a compliance percentage reported monthly against the Essential Eight timeframes.
- Endpoint protection
- Next-generation antivirus and EDR deployed, tuned and monitored. Detections are investigated by us, not forwarded to you with a request that you decide.
- Identity & access administration
- Onboarding, offboarding and role changes handled to an agreed checklist, including licence assignment, group membership, mailbox delegation and — critically — the revocation steps that usually get missed when someone leaves.
- Network & connectivity
- Firewall, switching and wireless configuration, firmware currency, VPN and remote access, plus liaison with your carrier when the fault turns out to be theirs.
- Server & infrastructure
- On-premises, co-located and Azure workloads: capacity, health, patching, certificate lifecycle and end-of-life tracking, so hardware and operating systems are replaced on a plan rather than after a failure.
- Vendor management
- We deal with your line-of-business software vendors, your ISP and your printer company on your behalf, and we keep the ticket open on our side until it is resolved on theirs.
- Documentation & reporting
- A living runbook of your environment, an asset register, and a monthly report covering tickets, patch compliance, backup success, security posture and anything we want to raise before it becomes a project.
Measured against the hire you would otherwise make
The real comparison is almost never managed IT against doing nothing. It is managed IT against putting someone on staff — and that is a closer contest than the salary line suggests, in the wrong direction.
An advertised salary is roughly three quarters of what the position actually costs once superannuation, payroll tax, leave loading, recruitment, a desk and a laptop are added. What that money buys is one person with one set of skills, available for about nineteen per cent of the calendar — because nobody works nights, weekends, annual leave or the fortnight they are unwell. We set the whole calculation out separately, with every assumption shown.
For a comparable figure a managed agreement buys a team rather than a person: a service desk that is staffed when your one hire is asleep, specialists in identity, networking and security instead of one generalist covering all three, and the monitoring, patching and endpoint tooling already licensed across our client base rather than bought again at list price for you alone.
It also removes a risk that rarely reaches the business case. A single internal hire is a single point of failure who can resign, and the knowledge usually leaves with them.
The savings are mostly in what stops happening
Some of it is on the invoice. Most of it is in the incidents, the downtime and the emergency call-outs that a maintained environment does not generate.
- Prevented tickets, not billed hours. A fixed monthly fee means the work we do to stop problems recurring is work we want to do, because it is the only way the model pays for us.
- Tooling at our scale, not yours. Monitoring, patch management, EDR and documentation platforms are licensed across the whole client base, which is a very different number to buying each one for a single business.
- Downtime that does not happen. The cheapest hour of IT support is the one nobody needed. Patching, monitoring and tested backups are unglamorous precisely because they are working.
- No recruitment, no turnover, no gap. You are not carrying the cost of hiring, the risk of a resignation, or the months where the role sits vacant and the work does not.
- Purchasing at trade, with the margin stated. Hardware and licences are sourced at cost plus a margin we tell you, so you can compare it against buying direct.
- A budget you can forecast. One number per seat per month, and project work quoted and approved before it starts rather than discovered afterwards.
What people ask before signing
How long does transition from our current provider take?
Four to six weeks for a typical 50–250 seat environment, longer for multi-site or regulated environments. We run in parallel with your incumbent for the first two weeks so nothing depends on their goodwill during handover, then cut over the service desk once documentation, monitoring and backup are verified on our side.
If your incumbent is uncooperative — it happens — we rebuild the documentation from the environment itself. It takes longer, and we will tell you upfront if that is what we are looking at.
Do we have to replace our existing tools?
Not automatically. We have standards because supporting eleven different antivirus products badly serves nobody, but if you have a tool that works and your team knows it, we will assess it on merit and tell you honestly whether replacing it is worth the disruption.
Is support genuinely unlimited?
There is no ticket allowance and no block-hour drawdown — raise as many as you need, including the small ones. Project work such as a migration or an office move is quoted and approved before it starts, so it is visible to you in advance rather than appearing on an invoice afterwards.
What happens if we want to leave?
Twelve-month initial term, then month to month with 60 days' notice. Exit assistance is priced in the agreement before you sign it: documentation handover, tenant admin transfer, agent removal and a knowledge transfer session with the incoming provider. Your data and documentation are yours throughout.
Who actually answers the phone?
An engineer in Australia who has access to your documentation. Not an offshore triage layer whose job is to take a message. On the Fortified tier you also get a named technical account manager who knows your environment without reading about it first.
See your environment the way we would
A fixed fee, a written position. Yours to keep whether or not you engage us.