Managed IT services
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Four weeks from signature to full responsibility. We don't accept an SLA on a system we haven't understood.
- 01
Discovery
What exists, how it connects, where the credentials live, and what has broken before. Almost always finds something undocumented and load-bearing.
- 02
Stabilise
Fix what's already broken or unmonitored: missing backups, expired certificates, unpatched systems, absent alerting. Quoted separately if it's substantial.
- 03
Instrument
Monitoring, alerting and runbooks in place, tuned so alerts mean something. An alert nobody acts on trains everyone to ignore all of them.
- 04
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.
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.
Start a project
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.
- Reply within one business day
- Free scoping session, no obligation
- You keep the scope document either way