Managed IT & service desk
Someone picks up. The problem gets fixed. You get on with your day.
Every IT company on both sides of the Tasman sells managed services. The words are identical on all of our websites, which makes them useless to you. So this page is mostly about how the thing actually runs — who answers, what's included, what isn't, and what you get in writing every quarter.
How it actually runs
The label is meaningless. The mechanics aren't.
"Managed IT" has been stretched to mean anything from a monitoring agent nobody reads the alerts from, through to a full internal IT department on contract. Neither is wrong. They just cost wildly different amounts and it's on us to be clear about which one you're buying.
Here's ours. You get a fixed monthly fee covering unlimited support for an agreed scope of people and systems. We monitor and patch your machines and servers. When something starts going wrong we usually see it before you ring us — not always, and we'll say so when we didn't.
Every request becomes a ticket. You can log in and see your own tickets, your own devices and what we've been doing, without having to ask. That last part matters more than it sounds. The most common complaint we hear about the previous provider isn't that they were bad — it's that nobody could tell what they were doing for the money.
Choosing a level
Three levels, and we'll talk you out of the wrong one.
Most businesses of 10 to 50 people land in the middle. The top tier exists because some businesses genuinely can't afford an hour of downtime, and it would be dishonest to sell that cover to a business that can.
| What you get | Essentials | Managed | Priority Managed Services Package |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unlimited service desk for the agreed scope | Business hours | Business hours | Business hours, plus after-hours and emergency cover |
| Monitoring, patching and proactive issue detection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ticket and support portal | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vendor wrangling (your phone system, your line-of-business software, your internet) | On request | Included | Included, and we chase them so you don't |
| Business review with your numbers in it | Annual | Quarterly | Quarterly, with a documented roadmap and budget |
| Priority in the queue when everything breaks at once | — | — | Yes |
Pricing
From $— per person per month, with a minimum engagement of $— per month.
Almost nobody in this industry publishes a price, and we understand why — every environment is different and a number on a page invites an unfair comparison. We'd rather give you a rough one anyway, so you can work out in thirty seconds whether we're in your range. If we're not, that's a useful thing for both of us to find out before a meeting.
The real number depends on how many people you have, how many servers are still hiding in a cupboard, and how much of the mess is ours to inherit. We quote after we've looked, not before.
The fine print, up front
What "unlimited" doesn't mean.
Unlimited means unlimited support for the agreed scope. It doesn't mean unlimited everything, and any provider telling you otherwise has either hidden the exclusions in a contract or hasn't thought it through.
In the monthly fee
- Day-to-day support for your people and their devices
- Monitoring, patching and maintenance
- Account changes, new starters and leavers
- Dealing with your other vendors on your behalf
- Advice, including the advice not to spend money
Normally quoted separately
- Project work — migrations, office moves, a new server, a fleet rollout
- Hardware — laptops, switches, firewalls, the actual tin
- Third-party licences — Microsoft 365, backup, security tooling
- Work caused by something we told you not to do, which is rare and always a conversation first
Support hours. Monday to Friday, 8am – 6pm AEST/AEDT, with after-hours and emergency cover for managed clients. We're not going to claim 24/7 — a genuine round-the-clock desk needs staff sitting at it at 3am, and we'd rather tell you what we really have than sell you a roster that doesn't exist.
The first 30 days
Changing IT providers is the bit everyone dreads.
Fair enough. It usually involves admitting nobody knows the password to something important. Here's how it goes.
-
Week one — find out what you've actually got
Every device, every server, every account, every licence, every system somebody set up in 2017 and forgot. We document it. You'd be surprised how often this turns up a paid subscription for a business unit that closed.
-
Week one — take control of the keys
Domain names, Microsoft 365 tenant, backups, firewall. We check that you, the business, own each of them — not a former employee, not the last provider. This is the single most common nasty surprise in an onboarding.
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Week two — agents out, monitoring on
The Ginko Connect Agent goes onto machines, monitoring and patching start reporting, and we get eyes on backup success and failure. From here we stop guessing.
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Week two — meet your people
A short session so staff know how to log a ticket and who's on the other end. Ten minutes, no slides. People raise issues far earlier when they know the name of the person who'll answer.
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Weeks three and four — the honest findings
A written list of what we found, sorted into "fix now", "budget for this year" and "live with it". Some of it will be unflattering to whoever came before. We'll keep that professional, but we won't soften the technical facts.
Quarterly business review
A meeting with numbers in it.
Not a relationship catch-up. Four things, on a page, every quarter:
- What broke — tickets by type, what kept recurring, what we did about the cause rather than the symptom
- What it cost — your actual spend, including the project work and licences outside the monthly fee
- What's ageing — machines, servers and systems heading for end of support, with dates
- What's coming — what we think you should budget for over the next twelve months, and roughly what it'll be
If a quarterly review has no numbers in it, it's a sales meeting wearing a lanyard.
Co-managed IT
You've already got someone internal.
Plenty of businesses have one very capable IT person who is drowning. They know the business inside out and they're also the only one who can take a holiday, be sick, or handle a server migration while the help desk queue builds up.
Co-managed means we take the parts that don't need business context — the after-hours cover, the patching, the tier-one queue, the specialist work like an Azure migration or an Essential Eight uplift — and your person keeps the parts only they can do.
We're not there to replace them, and we'll say so to them directly on day one. An internal IT person who thinks you're auditioning their replacement will not help us, and honestly, why would they.
Want to know what you're actually paying for now?
Book a free IT review. We'll look at what you've got, what it costs, and what's exposed — and you get the findings in writing whether or not you ever use us.
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The obligations you actually have, in plain English.
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