What should be included in a managed IT subscription?
Managed IT means different things to different providers. Here's what a complete subscription covers, and the exclusions worth asking about before you sign.
The five things that should always be in
Support for your team, with a clear way to raise something and a sensible expectation of when it's picked up. Monitoring of the systems that matter, 24/7, with somebody responding to alerts. Scheduled maintenance: patching, updates, hygiene work. Security management: protection deployed, multi-factor enforced, detections investigated. Backup management: configured, verified, and tested by restoring.
If any of those five sits outside the fee, you don't have a managed service — you have a helpdesk with a subscription attached.
The two that distinguish a good one
Documentation you own: an asset register, network and system documentation, and the detail required to hand over to someone else. If leaving your provider would mean rebuilding knowledge from scratch, that's a risk you're carrying.
Regular review: a conversation about what's ageing, what's at risk and what's coming, in language you can act on. This is what turns IT spending into planning.
What's reasonably excluded
Hardware and software licences. Projects — a new site, an office move, a server replacement, a migration. Remediation of problems that existed before the agreement started. Third-party subscriptions bought in your name.
These exclusions are normal and reasonable. What matters is that they're written down and quoted up front, rather than discovered on an invoice.
Questions that reveal the shape of an agreement
Is onsite support included or charged? Are after-hours incidents covered, and what counts as after hours? How many hours of project work, if any, are included? Who owns the documentation and monitoring tooling? What happens at the end of the term?
You're not looking for every answer to be generous. You're looking for every answer to exist.
Be wary of 'unlimited' as the whole pitch
Unlimited support sounds attractive, and genuinely removes the hesitation that stops staff reporting problems. But on its own it describes a helpdesk. The value of a managed agreement is in the work that happens when nobody has reported anything — the scheduled, automated, documented part.
Universal Support includes all seven: team support, monitoring, maintenance, security, backup, documentation and regular review. Hardware, licences and projects are quoted separately and clearly.
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