Resources · Burlington, Ontario
Short, practical notes drawn from assessments and onboardings. No gated downloads and no forms — if the information is useful, it should be readable.
01Guides
Who owns the documentation and administrative credentials? What is included versus billable? Are security controls part of the base fee? What are the response targets by priority, and what happens when they are missed? How does the agreement end, and what is handed back? A provider unwilling to answer these in writing is telling you something.
Renewal questionnaires have tightened considerably. Expect questions on MFA for all remote and administrative access, endpoint detection and response, offsite and immutable backup, tested recovery, email filtering with domain authentication, privileged access control, patch cadence, security awareness training and a documented incident response plan. Answering optimistically is a claim-denial risk.
Backup is a copy of data. Disaster recovery is the ability to restore systems within a defined recovery time and recovery point objective. Business continuity is how the organization keeps operating while that happens. Most organizations have the first, assume the second and have never written the third.
Conditional access, legacy authentication blocking, privileged role review, external sharing governance, retention and litigation hold, Intune compliance baselines, Defender safe links and attachments, mailbox audit review, and third-party backup of tenant data. Nearly all are included in licensing organizations already pay for.
Break/fix costs less on a good month and considerably more on a bad one. It rewards a provider for problems recurring and gives nobody responsibility for prevention, documentation or lifecycle planning. Managed IT converts that to a fixed fee and moves the incentive toward stability. For organizations under about ten users with minimal dependency, break/fix can still be reasonable.
Start eight to twelve weeks out. Carrier installation is almost always the critical path. Confirm circuit delivery dates, cabling and rack location, electrical and cooling, wireless survey requirements, firewall and switch configuration, phone porting, printer placement, and a cutover plan with a defined fallback if the new circuit is late.
02FAQ
Total spend commonly lands between two and six percent of revenue depending on how technology-dependent the organization is, with regulated and technology-led firms at the higher end. Managed services are only part of that: licensing, hardware refresh, connectivity and project work make up the rest, which is why we budget the full picture rather than the monthly fee alone.
Typically two to six weeks depending on size and condition. The first phase is discovery and documentation, followed by deploying monitoring and security tooling, closing critical gaps, then a remediation plan for everything else on an agreed schedule.
Yes, and it is routine. We work through credential and documentation transfer, tenant and licensing ownership, backup continuity, monitoring changeover and vendor notifications, with a cutover plan that avoids a coverage gap between providers.
Yes. Mixed Windows, macOS, iOS and Android fleets are managed through Intune or equivalent tooling, with compliance and security policy applied consistently across platforms.
Providing Two Decades of IT Experience
We review your current environment, security posture, cloud footprint and support model, then outline what to fix first and what it should cost.
