// Managed IT Services · Düsseldorf & Rhine-Ruhr
Managed IT Services — your IT kept running
Maintenance, monitoring and support as a standing arrangement rather than a stack of invoices. You know who is answerable, and we know how your environment is put together.
// Operating model
Four things that keep running in the background
Ongoing care is not a subscription to standby. It is work that happens on the days when nothing is broken.
Visibility
Servers, network hardware and backup jobs report their own condition. A disk filling up or a backup that quietly stopped shows up long before anybody trips over it.
Care on a rhythm
Updates, patches and hardware care follow a plan, inside windows agreed with you — not in the middle of the morning when orders are coming in.
The way back, tested
Accounts, endpoint protection and backups belong to daily operation. A backup that has never been restored does not count as a backup in our books.
Sharpening up
We sit down regularly and look at recurring faults, load and equipment coming to the end of its life. That conversation becomes next year’s plan.
// Responsibility
Who does what?
The most common reason for a long outage is not technology. It is an open question about who was supposed to act. So we put the answer in the contract.
// Comparison
Reactive or planned?
You call once it has stopped
- Costs arrive as a surprise, usually at the worst possible moment
- Every report starts with explaining the environment again
- Maintenance happens whenever somebody remembers it
- Nobody has a view of the whole picture
It runs, and you barely notice
- A monthly figure you can budget for instead of fluctuating invoices
- Your environment is documented and familiar
- Maintenance and updates have fixed windows
- Odd behaviour is reported before it disrupts anyone
// Handover
How ongoing care starts with us
It begins with an inventory: which devices exist, which contracts are running, where the administrator accounts sit, what is documented and what lives only in somebody’s head. That week is uncomfortable and saves the most time later.
Out of it comes a list of open points, ordered by urgency. Some we clear immediately because they remove risk cheaply; the rest goes into the annual plan, because doing it now would disrupt more than it fixes.
The environment only moves into regular care once accounts, monitoring and backups are in order. Committing to response times before that point would not be honest.
// Questions about managed care
What directors settle before they sign
01 How is a managed agreement different from calling you per incident?
With single call-outs you pay to repair something after it has already stopped. Under a managed agreement you pay for it to stop less often: maintenance, updates and monitoring run on a fixed rhythm, and we usually notice the warning signs before your staff do.
02 Do we stay in control of our own systems?
Yes. Licences, contracts and administrator accounts remain in your name, and the documentation of the environment is handed to you. That way a change of provider can never fail for technical reasons that only we could resolve.
03 Does the agreement cover nights and weekends?
Monitoring and support are available around the clock. Which alerts justify waking somebody outside office hours and which can wait for the next working day is something we agree together — otherwise a full printer queue gets a person out of bed at three in the morning.
04 What response times do you commit to?
Response times are written into the service agreement and graded by urgency. The grading follows what has actually stopped at your end: one workstation is not the same as a dispatch bay that cannot ship.
05 Can we hand over only part of our IT?
Yes. Some clients hand over servers and network and keep the workstations with their own team. The only thing that matters is that the line is unambiguous — a shared responsibility turns into waiting time the moment something breaks.
06 How long does an agreement run for?
Term and notice periods are set out in the quotation. We keep them short enough to match how you plan your investments, rather than long enough to keep a relationship alive artificially.
Related
All IT services
How much of your IT currently rests on one person?
If the honest answer makes you wince, it is worth a conversation. We look at the environment and say which part of it belongs under a managed agreement.