What is managed IT support?
Managed IT support means handing the day-to-day running of your IT to an outside team for a regular monthly fee. A helpdesk only answers questions. Managed IT also takes responsibility for the state of your systems between calls, from Microsoft 365 accounts and user and identity management to backups and hardware replacement. It is the core of our managed IT services in Sydney. What is included depends on the plan, and you can compare our per-user managed IT plans.
What does security-first managed IT look like in practice?
- MFA where it matters most. Email, remote access and admin accounts are protected by multi-factor authentication as standard.
- Admin rights kept tight. Staff work from standard accounts, and admin access is limited to the people and tasks that need it.
- Patching tracked to completion. We don’t stop at “updates scheduled”. We follow up the devices that miss them.
- Backups that are tested. Where we manage your backups, we run regular test restores to check that data can be recovered.
- Alerts reviewed by people. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) and email alerts are reviewed by people who understand what they mean. See endpoint security for the detail.
These controls line up with ASD Essentials, the Australian Signals Directorate’s framework, and with the maturity model organisations are assessed against today. That helps you answer when a customer, insurer or auditor asks how your IT is secured. Application control, another of the controls ASD prioritises, is available as an add-on starting from $15 per device per month, ex GST.
How are response times agreed?
Response times and coverage are set out in a service level agreement (SLA) that we agree with you based on your requirements: how critical your systems are, your hours of operation and any extended cover you need. We would rather agree what you need than promise cover in advance.
How do we protect our access to your systems?
An IT provider’s access is a target in its own right: an attacker who compromises your provider can reach many clients at once. We treat our access to your environment with the same care we expect from you.
- Named engineer accounts with phishing-resistant MFA, rather than shared logins.
- Least-privilege Microsoft partner access through granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP), limited in scope and time.
What if you already have an IT person?
Many organisations keep an internal IT person or a long-standing contractor. We can work with them in a co-managed arrangement: they keep the work they know well, and we take on the helpdesk overflow, patching, monitoring and the security controls that are hard to keep on top of alone. This is a shared responsibility model: we discuss and agree who handles what during the initial engagement and set it out in writing. We share the same ticketing and documentation, and give your staff member admin access where it makes sense, so less falls between two parties.
