Managed IT means we look after your technology continuously for a fixed monthly fee, instead of waiting for you to call us once something has already stopped working.
Most small businesses in Eastern Iowa run their IT reactively. Something breaks, somebody calls somebody, it gets patched over, and the underlying cause is still there. It works until the day it does not, and the day it does not is usually expensive.
An agreement changes what we are being paid for. We are paid to keep your systems stable, which means every hour we spend preventing a problem is an hour we do not spend fixing one. Your incentive and ours point the same way.
What we actually manage
Your people and their devices
Workstations and laptops monitored and patched, both Windows and the applications on top of it, which is where most real-world compromises start. Endpoint protection deployed and monitored rather than installed and forgotten. New starters set up and leavers removed properly, so that accounts do not linger after someone has gone.
Your Microsoft 365 tenant
This is where the attacks land. Multi-factor authentication enforced rather than optional, conditional access configured, mailbox auditing switched on, and sign-in activity reviewed. We also back your tenant up, because Microsoft does not: their job is to keep the service running, not to recover an account somebody emptied last Tuesday.
Where it fits, we move businesses onto Microsoft 365 Business Premium and use what is already in the licence, including Defender and Intune, rather than selling you a second product that does the same job. The licences stay registered to you.
Your network
Firewall, switches and wireless configured, monitored and kept current. Guest traffic separated from business traffic. Wireless planned around how many devices you actually have, not how many the box claims to support.
Your backups, tested
Backup is the part everyone says they have and very few can prove. We run backups with an immutable offsite copy, so that a copy exists which ransomware cannot encrypt or delete even with your administrator credentials. Then we test restores on a schedule and write down the result, because an untested backup is a belief rather than a plan.
Do you need a server at all?
Often not, and we will tell you so even though a server is a larger invoice. For most businesses under about thirty people, cloud identity with Microsoft 365 removes the domain controller entirely: nothing sitting in a cupboard to patch, back up or fail on a Monday morning, and staff who can work from anywhere without a VPN.
Some businesses genuinely still need a server, usually because a piece of industry software demands one, or because of how their files and printing are set up. Where that is the case we will say so and build it properly. What we will not do is put a business-critical system on consumer hardware to make a quote look smaller.
Who this suits
- Businesses of roughly five to fifty staff, with no internal IT person or with one who is stretched
- Anyone whose current arrangement is a friend, a relative, or a supplier who answers when they can
- Businesses being asked security questions by an insurer, a customer or a regulator, without anyone in-house to answer them
- Hospitality, professional services, clinics and small manufacturers across Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha, Iowa City and the surrounding counties
Who this does not suit
Businesses with fewer than about five staff usually do not get value from a monthly agreement, and we would rather say that up front than sell you one. Hourly support is the better answer at that size, and the rates are published.
What it costs
One price per thing we look after, support included. Workstations and users are $13 a month each, with servers, firewalls, switches, wireless and backup each carrying their own published price. If we manage it and it breaks, fixing it is what the fee is for — you are never billed for calling us about a machine we are already paid to keep running.
Every agreement also carries a monthly pool of hands-on time, remote or onsite, sized to what a well-maintained network your size actually uses: four hours for a ten-person office, fourteen for thirty staff, twenty-eight for a hundred. Most businesses never reach it.
In practice a ten-person office with one server comes to around $548 a month. Forty devices with six servers and managed wireless comes to around $1,630. A hundred users across three sites comes to around $4,305. Every line behind those numbers is published.
See pricing Book a free assessment
Not ready to let anyone into your systems? Have us email you the 12-point checklist and grade yourself first — no call, no obligation.
How it starts
With a free 30-minute assessment. We look at your backups, your firewall and your Microsoft 365 setup, and send you a written summary of what we found and what we would fix first. It is yours whether or not you go any further, and it is how we work out the honest number for a proposal.