Managed IT is one of the most useful services a small business can buy and one of the least clearly explained. Here is exactly what sits inside ours, tier by tier, without the jargon.
The idea in one sentence
Instead of calling someone when something breaks and paying by the hour, you pay a predictable monthly fee per user and we take responsibility for keeping your technology working, secure and up to date. The incentive flips: we make money when your systems run smoothly, not when they fail.
Silver: the essentials
Silver is built for sole traders and micro-businesses with up to about ten users. It covers the fundamentals every business needs: a help-desk you can call between 9am and 5pm, Microsoft 365 set up and managed properly, managed print with automatic toner, office Wi-Fi and internet looked after, and automated health checks that keep antivirus, disk space and patching in order. Server and endpoint backup is included, and a security baseline of Microsoft Defender and multi-factor authentication is available as an add-on.
Gold: proactive management
Gold is our most popular tier and suits small businesses of five to twenty-five users. It includes everything in Silver and adds the layer that turns support into management: single sign-on and self-service password resets, advanced print tracking software, phone system management, silent auto-remediation that fixes routine problems before a ticket is raised, device lifecycle planning so replacements are scheduled rather than sudden, and monthly reporting so you can see what is happening. Network segmentation between guest and private traffic is available where the network hardware is supplied through us.
Diamond: an active security posture
Diamond is for growing businesses, or any organisation handling sensitive data, typically ten to fifty users. It builds on Gold with the controls that stop modern attacks: endpoint detection and response on every device, role-based file access, conditional access that verifies logins by location and device, remote wipe for lost phones and laptops, monthly phishing simulations and awareness training, DNS and web filtering, secure work-from-home access with two-factor authentication, and round-the-clock monitoring of all network infrastructure.
Platinum: compliance-grade
Platinum is for regulated industries, government supply chains and any business with formal compliance obligations. On top of Diamond it adds long-retention disaster recovery, compliance-grade reporting aligned to the Essential Eight and ISO 27001, automated enforcement of device compliance policy, an enterprise networking review for redundancy and resilience, zero-trust access where required, certified secure disposal of retired hardware, and a quarterly compliance review separate from the standard monthly check-in.
How to choose
Start with two questions. How many people rely on your systems, and how bad would a breach or an outage be? A ten-person trades business with no sensitive data is well served by Silver or Gold. A law firm, medical practice, accountant or anyone holding client records should be looking at Diamond, because the cost of a breach dwarfs the difference in monthly fee. If an auditor, insurer or government contract sets your standards, Platinum is built for exactly that.
Every tier is cumulative and you can move up as you grow without re-onboarding. Pricing is per user per month, quoted to your actual size, and always compared side by side so you can see precisely what each step adds.
The part that is the same at every tier
Whatever level you choose, you get the same local team, the same phone number and the same commitment: real engineers in Geelong, not a call centre, who know your environment and take ownership of the outcome. That is the bit no tier table can capture, and it is the reason most of our customers have been with us for years.
What is not included, and why that matters
Transparency cuts both ways, so it is worth saying what a managed agreement does not cover. Hardware purchases sit outside the monthly fee, though we supply and configure them at competitive prices. Large projects such as an office move or a full server migration are scoped and quoted separately, because bundling them would inflate everyone’s monthly cost. Third-party software licences, such as Microsoft 365, are passed through at cost. We would rather you know the boundaries up front than discover them on an invoice, which is the same standard we hold every supplier of ours to.
How onboarding works
Moving to a managed agreement is simpler than most businesses expect. We start with a discovery session to document your environment, then deploy our monitoring and security tooling, tidy up anything urgent, and set a baseline. Most businesses are fully onboarded within two to three weeks, with no disruption to daily work. From there the relationship runs on a monthly rhythm of reporting, review and quiet, proactive maintenance. The goal is that within a month, technology has moved from something you worry about to something you simply expect to work.
