What managed IT support includes, and what it costs
Managed IT contracts vary far more than the marketing suggests. Two quotes at the same per-user price can differ by thousands a year once you read what is excluded.
The problem
"Fully managed IT support, £X per user per month" is not a comparable figure. One provider means unlimited remote support, patching, monitoring, security tooling and onsite visits. Another means a helpdesk during office hours with everything else billed hourly, licences on top, and a project fee for anything that takes longer than twenty minutes. Both are legitimate business models. Only one of them matches the number in your budget.
What is normally included
Across most UK SME contracts, the following is inside the monthly fee. If any of it is not, that is worth knowing before you compare prices.
The items that vary most are onsite attendance and security tooling. Read those two clauses carefully in any quote.
- Helpdesk for day-to-day user issues, remote, within defined hours
- Proactive monitoring of endpoints and servers, with alerting on disk, backup and patch failures
- Patch management for operating systems and common applications
- Endpoint protection management, though the licence itself is sometimes separate
- Backup monitoring — note that this often means checking the job ran, not testing that a restore works
- Starters and leavers processing, usually up to a fair-use volume
- Vendor liaison with your line-of-business software suppliers and your ISP
What is normally chargeable
Being billed for these is not a sign of a bad provider. Being surprised by them is a sign of a bad contract.
The honest test of a provider is whether they told you about this list before you signed or after your first invoice.
- Projects — migrations, office moves, server replacement, network redesign
- Hardware and licences — passed through, sometimes with a margin
- Out-of-hours work beyond emergency cover, if emergency cover is even included
- Onsite visits beyond an included allowance, or in some contracts at all
- Third-party application support where the vendor charges the provider
- Offboarding — the cost and cooperation involved in leaving, which is the clause nobody reads
How per-user pricing actually works
Per-user pricing is the UK norm for SMEs and it is reasonable, but the definition of "user" matters. Is a shared shop-floor login one user or none? Does a director with a laptop, a phone and a home machine count once or three times? Does the count include leavers until you tell them?
Per-device pricing suits businesses with few people and lots of equipment; per-user suits knowledge-work businesses where each person has several devices. Site-based fixed fees suit predictable estates. What you should resist is a model where the count can drift upwards without anyone deciding, which is how a contract quietly outgrows its budget.
If you want to sanity-check a quote against the cost of doing it internally, our IT cost calculator and the in-house vs managed comparison cover that trade-off.
Response times, and what they actually promise
Almost every contract quotes response times. Very few quote resolution times, for the good reason that resolution depends on the fault. What matters is that priorities are defined by business impact rather than by the provider's convenience, and that there is a real path when a P1 is not moving.
Ask what happens when the target is missed. If the answer is "we report on it", the SLA is a description rather than a commitment. Service credits are not a large sum of money; their value is that they force the provider to care about the measurement.
Questions to ask before signing
These six questions separate providers faster than any capability matrix.
A provider who answers all six directly is usually worth more than one who is slightly cheaper and vague on three of them.
- When did you last perform a test restore for a client of our size, and what did it show?
- What is explicitly excluded from the monthly fee?
- Who is our named engineer, and what happens when they are on holiday?
- What is your notice period, and what does offboarding cost and include?
- Do we own our licences, domains and documentation, or do you?
- How do you handle security incidents out of hours?