What does managed IT support include?

A helpdesk for day-to-day issues, monitoring and patching of servers and devices, Microsoft 365 and account management, backup and restore testing, security baseline work and onsite engineer visits where needed.

What is the difference between managed IT support and break-fix?

Break-fix waits for something to go wrong and bills you to fix it. Managed support is a fixed monthly arrangement focused on preventing the failure in the first place, with monitoring, patching and tested backups.

How is managed IT support priced?

Most managed support is priced per user or per device on a fixed monthly fee, so the cost is predictable. The price should cover the helpdesk, monitoring, patching and account management rather than charging per ticket.

Can you take over from our current IT provider?

Yes. We document the environment, take ownership of the Microsoft 365 tenant, domains, licences and accounts, check backups and remove access that should have been removed, then run a short onboarding before taking over support.

Do you support schools as well as businesses?

Yes. We support businesses and schools across Manchester, Oldham and the North West, including onsite engineer visits, Microsoft 365, filtering and monitoring, backups and evidence for DfE digital standards.

Managed IT support for businesses in Manchester, Oldham and the North West

Most businesses do not find out their IT support is bad until something breaks. A server fails and the backup has never been tested. A laptop dies and nobody knows where the licences live. The previous provider left and took the documentation with them.

This guide explains what managed IT support actually involves, what it should cost, how to compare providers, and what we would set up first for a real business. No filler. Just how the work is done when it is done properly.

Read the guide Talk to us about your setup

1st to 3rd line helpdesk Microsoft 365 and Entra ID Onsite engineers across the North West

Most IT support is reactive. That is the whole problem.

The standard model works like this. Something breaks, you ring a number, someone eventually fixes it, you get an invoice. It feels fine when nothing is going wrong. Then the file server dies on a Tuesday and you discover that nothing was being monitored, the warranty expired two years ago, and the backup job has been silently failing since March.

We see the same pattern when we take over from another provider. The visible work (resetting passwords, fixing printers) was getting done. The invisible work was not. Nobody was patching the server. Nobody was checking the backups had actually restored. Nobody had a record of which leavers still had live accounts in Microsoft 365.

Managed IT support exists to do the invisible work on a schedule, before it becomes a crisis. That is the entire difference between a managed service and break-fix. Not the helpdesk, not the response time promises. Whether someone is paid to look at your systems when nothing is wrong.

How to tell which one you currently have

Ask your provider when your server was last patched. If the answer takes more than a day, it is break-fix.
Ask when a backup restore was last tested. Not run. Tested.
Ask for a list of every active user account in your Microsoft 365 tenant. Compare it to your payroll.
Ask what they monitor proactively, and what alerted in the last month.

If those questions make your current provider uncomfortable, this guide will be useful. If they can answer all four straight away, keep them. Good providers are worth keeping.

What managed IT support actually is

Managed IT support means a provider takes ongoing responsibility for your systems for a fixed monthly fee. Not just answering the phone when things break. Running the systems. Here is what that means mechanically.

An agent on every device

Every computer and server gets a small piece of monitoring software, called an RMM agent (we use NinjaOne). It reports health, installed software, patch status and warning signs back to our helpdesk. A failing hard drive throws errors weeks before it dies. With an agent installed, we see those errors. Without one, you find out when the machine will not boot.

Patching on a schedule, not a whim

Windows, Microsoft 365 apps and third-party software get security updates constantly. Unpatched machines are how most real-world attacks succeed, which is why patching is one of the five Cyber Essentials controls. Under a managed contract, patches deploy on a tested schedule and we get alerted on any machine that falls behind.

A helpdesk with tiers, not one overworked engineer

1st line handles passwords, printing, email and the day-to-day. 2nd line handles deeper workstation and software faults. 3rd line handles servers, networking and infrastructure. The point of tiers is speed: most tickets are simple and get fixed in minutes by 1st line, while the complicated ones go straight to someone senior instead of queueing behind password resets.

Backup that someone actually checks

Backup jobs fail quietly. Disks fill, credentials expire, jobs hang. A managed service includes monitored backups with periodic test restores. The test restore is the part that matters. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a plan.

Documentation that survives staff changes

Network diagrams, licence records, admin credentials, supplier contracts and renewal dates, all kept in a documented system rather than in one engineer's head. This is also what makes leaving a provider painless, which we cover later, because you should never be trapped by missing documentation.

The failure modes we keep seeing

When we onboard a new client, the first month is mostly archaeology. These are the things we find most often. None of them are exotic. All of them are expensive when they finally surface.

Leavers with live accounts

Staff who left months or years ago still have working Microsoft 365 logins. Sometimes with mailbox access. Sometimes with admin rights. This is the single most common security gap we find, and it is an account housekeeping failure, not a sophisticated attack.

Backups that were never tested

The backup software is installed and the job shows green. Then a restore is needed and the chain is broken, the storage is full, or the one folder that mattered was excluded. Green ticks are not evidence. Restores are evidence.

Servers out of warranty and out of patches

A server bought eight years ago, running an operating system Microsoft stopped patching, with no support contract. It works until it does not, and when it does not, parts and recovery options are limited.

Everyone is an admin

Local admin rights on every laptop, global admin in Microsoft 365 shared between three people and a consultant who left in 2023. Admin sprawl turns every phishing click into a potential full compromise.

Licensing nobody can explain

Paying for Microsoft 365 licences for staff who left, duplicate subscriptions, or the wrong plan entirely. Licence audits are boring and they routinely pay for themselves.

No documentation at all

The previous provider held everything: passwords, domain registrar, firewall config. When the relationship ended, so did access to the information. Recovering control of your own systems should never require negotiation.

If you recognise two or more of these, the fix is not necessarily switching provider. It is making someone accountable for the invisible work. That can be in-house, outsourced or both, which is the next section.

What is included with Remedian managed IT support

Our managed contracts cover the full running of your IT. The list below is the actual scope, not a brochure version of it.

Area	What we do
Helpdesk, 1st to 3rd line	Phone, email and remote support for every user. Tiered escalation so complex faults reach senior engineers quickly.
Onsite engineers	Engineers across Manchester, Oldham and the North West for faults that cannot be fixed remotely, plus scheduled site visits where the contract includes them.
Monitoring and patching	NinjaOne RMM agents on every device. Automated patching for Windows and third-party software. Alerts on disk health, backup failures and machines falling behind.
Microsoft 365 management	Tenant administration, licence management, Entra ID, starter and leaver processes, SharePoint and Exchange Online. Security baseline including MFA enforcement.
Backup and disaster recovery	Monitored backups with scheduled test restores, covering servers and Microsoft 365 data.
Security baseline	Endpoint protection, firewall management (Fortinet and Sophos), and Cyber Essentials support when you need the certification.
Servers and networking	Server support, network design, switches, Wi-Fi and structured cabling.
Procurement and lifecycle	Hardware sourcing at trade pricing, warranty tracking, and replacement planning so kit is refreshed before it fails rather than after.

Two things deliberately not on the list: long lock-in contracts and charges for every phone call. Support contracts that punish you for asking for help train your staff to stop reporting problems, and unreported problems are how small faults become big ones.

How the helpdesk actually works

Every provider claims fast response times. The way to judge a helpdesk is to understand the path a ticket takes, then ask where yours would slow down.

The path of a ticket

Logged. You raise the fault by phone, email or portal. It gets a ticket number immediately, not when someone gets round to it. Everything is tracked from this point.
Triaged. 1st line picks it up, confirms the impact, and either fixes it there and then or routes it. Most everyday faults (passwords, email, printing, Microsoft 365 problems) end here, fixed remotely.
Escalated. Hardware faults, server issues and networking problems go to 2nd or 3rd line. Escalation is based on the fault, not on how long 1st line has struggled with it.
Onsite if needed. If hands are required on hardware, an engineer is scheduled. Because we are based in Oldham and Manchester, onsite for North West clients means hours, not days.
Closed with a record. The fix is documented against your account. Recurring faults become visible patterns, and patterns get root-cause fixes instead of repeat tickets.

The part most providers skip

That last step is the one to ask about. A helpdesk that closes tickets without recording causes will fix the same printer forty times and call it good service. We review ticket patterns per client. If one site generates a spike in Wi-Fi tickets, the fix is a network survey, not faster ticket closure. [Need Remedian proof: a real anonymised example of a recurring fault fixed at root cause would strengthen this paragraph.]

In-house IT vs outsourced vs hybrid: an honest comparison

We sell managed support, so you should expect us to be biased. Here is the comparison anyway, including the cases where hiring in-house is the right call.

Factor	In-house IT	Managed provider	Hybrid
Cost shape	Salary, training, software tooling, plus cover for holidays and sickness	Fixed monthly fee, scales with users or devices	Salary plus a smaller managed contract
Breadth of skills	One or two people cannot be expert in networking, servers, Microsoft 365 and security at once	A team with specialists per area	In-house handles the day-to-day, provider handles depth
Coverage	One person is never on holiday, ill and at a conference simultaneously, but it feels like it	Helpdesk staffed across the team	Provider covers gaps
Business knowledge	Excellent. Knows every quirk of your setup and your people	Good after onboarding, dependent on documentation discipline	Best of both
Best fit	Larger organisations, or heavy bespoke systems	Most businesses under roughly 100 staff	Growing businesses with an IT manager who needs backup

The honest version of the cost argument: a competent IT manager's salary buys a lot of managed support. But the comparison is not salary versus contract fee. It is one person's available hours and skills versus a team's. The failure point for solo in-house IT is not ability, it is coverage and breadth. Nobody can hold helpdesk, projects, security and strategy alone, and the invisible work is the first thing dropped when they are firefighting.

Hybrid is underrated. Some of our best client relationships are with in-house IT managers who use us as 3rd line escalation and project capacity. We make them look good. They keep the business knowledge. Everyone wins.

How managed IT pricing really works

Most providers will not discuss pricing until you are in a sales meeting. That secrecy benefits them, not you. Here is how the models work so you can compare quotes properly.

Per user, per month

You pay a fixed amount for each member of staff, covering all their devices and support needs. Predictable, scales cleanly with headcount, and the most common model for office-based businesses. The catch to check: what counts as a user, and what happens with shared devices, meeting rooms and part-timers.

Per device, per month

Priced on the kit rather than the people. Often fits schools and manufacturers better, where one person might use three devices or thirty people might share five. Check how servers are priced; they should cost more than workstations because they carry more risk and more work.

Block hours and break-fix

Pre-purchased hours, or pay-as-you-go callouts. Cheapest on paper, and the model under which the invisible work never happens, because nobody is paying for it. Reasonable for a five-person business with simple needs. A false economy beyond that.

Questions that expose a bad quote

Is patching and monitoring included, or is the cheap headline price helpdesk-only?
Are onsite visits included or charged separately? At what rate?
Is project work (migrations, new servers, office moves) inside or outside the contract?
What is the contract term and notice period? Twelve months is normal. Three years should earn a discount and a side-eye.
What exactly happens when you leave? If offboarding is not described in the contract, that is deliberate.

If you want a like-for-like quote from us, send your current contract and we will price against the same scope. Small business support starts simpler and cheaper than full managed contracts; we will say so if that is all you need.

Microsoft 365: where most of the real work now lives

For most businesses we support, Microsoft 365 is the business. Email in Exchange Online, files in SharePoint and OneDrive, identity in Entra ID, chat in Teams. Which means tenant management is no longer an add-on to IT support. It is the core of it.

What managed tenant work includes

Starters and leavers done properly. New accounts with the right licences and group memberships on day one. Leavers disabled the day they leave, mailbox handled, licence reclaimed. This is process work, and it only happens reliably when it is someone's job.
MFA enforced everywhere. Not optional, not "rolling out", enforced. The NCSC is unambiguous on multi-factor authentication, and so are cyber insurers.
Licence management. The right plan per user, unused licences reclaimed, renewal dates tracked. Most tenants we take over are overspending here.
Admin hygiene. Named admin accounts, no shared credentials, global admin restricted to the few people who need it, with break-glass accounts documented.
SharePoint structure that staff can navigate. Permissions by group, external sharing controlled, no thousand-folder dumping ground migrated straight from the old file server.

Security in Microsoft 365 overlaps heavily with our cyber security guide, which covers tenant risk in more depth. The short version: most SME breaches now start with a Microsoft 365 account, usually a phished password on an account without MFA, or a leaver's account nobody disabled.

Switching providers without the pain

The number one reason businesses stay with a provider they are unhappy with is fear of the switch. That fear is rational, because some providers engineer it. Documentation withheld, admin passwords "being located", domain names registered in the provider's own account. We unpick this regularly, so here is how a switch should work.

What a proper handover looks like

Week 1: access and audit. Admin credentials transferred, RMM agents deployed, full audit of devices, servers, licences, backups and the Microsoft 365 tenant. You get a written report of what we found, including the problems.
Weeks 2 to 4: stabilise. Critical gaps fixed first: untested backups, missing MFA, unpatched servers, leaver accounts. Documentation built as we go.
From month 2: business as usual. Monitoring live, patching scheduled, helpdesk handling tickets, and a review of what should change over the next year.

What you should demand from any outgoing provider

All admin credentials. Domain registrar access. Microsoft 365 global admin. Firewall configs. Licence records. Backup access. These are yours. A provider who resists handing them over is confirming your decision to leave.

Our own offboarding commitment is the same one we benefit from when clients join us: thirty days' notice, everything documented and handed over, no hostage-taking. If we are doing our job you will not want to leave. If we are not, you should not have to fight us to. [Need Remedian confirmation: check the standard contract notice period is 30 days before publishing this figure.]

Sector-specific support

General IT support gets you most of the way. The last stretch is sector knowledge: the systems, regulators and failure modes specific to your world. These are the four we know best.

Schools and academies

We support 40+ schools with scheduled onsite engineer days, classroom hardware, iPad management through Apple MDM, MIS systems including SIMS and Bromcom, filtering for KCSIE compliance and DfE digital standards work. School IT support has its own dedicated page.

Solicitors and legal firms

Case management systems, SRA expectations around client data, and the cyber insurance questionnaires that now decide premiums. IT support for solicitors covers the detail.

Accountants and professional services

Practice software, client data confidentiality, and January. We plan maintenance around your filing deadlines, not ours. See IT support for accountants.

Manufacturing and engineering

Shop-floor machines that cannot simply be patched and rebooted, CAD workstations, and networks that mix office IT with production kit. Downtime here is measured in lost output, so monitoring and spares planning matter more than anywhere else.

Ten questions to ask any IT provider, including us

Use these in every sales meeting. Good providers will enjoy answering them. The rest will tell you what you need to know by how they dodge.

What is your average first response time, measured from your ticketing system, not your brochure?
How many engineers do you have, and what does your 1st, 2nd and 3rd line structure look like?
What do you monitor proactively on my systems, and can I see a sample alert report?
When did you last test-restore a client backup, and how often is that scheduled?
How do you handle starters and leavers in Microsoft 365, and how fast is a leaver disabled?
What is in the contract and what is billed extra? Onsite visits, projects, out-of-hours?
What is your notice period, and exactly what do you hand over when a client leaves?
Who owns my domain names, licences and admin credentials? (The only acceptable answer: you do.)
Can I speak to two clients of a similar size and sector?
What would you fix first in my setup, and why?

The last question is the best filter. A provider who has not looked at your environment but promises everything is fine is selling, not assessing. The honest answer to "what would you fix first" always starts with "we would need to look, but based on what you have described..."

Talk to us about your setup

If you want a second opinion on your current support, send the form. We will tell you what we would check first: backups, patching, leaver accounts, Microsoft 365 security settings and where your current contract has gaps. If your existing provider is doing a good job, we will say so.

We review your current setup and contract scope.
We tell you what to fix first, in plain English.
We quote like-for-like so you can compare properly.
We do not do pressure follow-up calls. One conversation, then it is your decision.

Ask Remedian to check your setup

Managed IT support FAQs

What is the difference between managed IT support and break-fix?

Break-fix means you pay when something breaks. Managed support means a provider runs your systems continuously for a fixed monthly fee: monitoring, patching, backups, helpdesk and account management. The practical difference is whether anyone is looking at your systems when nothing is wrong.
How much does managed IT support cost?

It depends on the pricing model, staff count, number of sites, servers, onsite cover and whether project work is included. Ask for the quote to be itemised. A cheap headline price is not useful if patching, onsite visits, backup checks or Microsoft 365 management are billed separately.
We already have an IT manager. Is managed support still relevant?

Yes, as a hybrid arrangement. Many businesses keep an internal IT person and use a managed provider for 3rd line escalation, projects, monitoring, security work and holiday cover. The in-house person keeps the business knowledge. The provider adds depth and coverage.
How quickly do you respond to support tickets?

Tickets are logged immediately and triaged by the helpdesk. Everyday faults such as passwords, email, printing and Microsoft 365 issues are usually handled remotely by 1st line. More complex faults are escalated to 2nd or 3rd line.
Do you support businesses outside Manchester and Oldham?

Yes. Remedian has offices in Manchester and Oldham, and supports businesses, schools and organisations across the wider North West. Remote support has no practical geographic limit. The only part that changes by location is onsite engineer attendance.
How hard is it to switch from our current IT provider?

It is usually easier than businesses expect. A proper switch starts with access, documentation, a system audit, Microsoft 365 checks, backup checks and monitoring deployment. The main risk is poor handover from the outgoing provider, which is why admin credentials, domain access, licences and documentation need to be requested early.
Do you do one-off projects without a support contract?

Yes. Server migrations, Microsoft 365 migrations, office moves, network installations, wireless upgrades and backup projects can be handled as standalone work. Some managed clients start with a single project first.

Secure Backup

A Secure Backup Solution from Remedian I.T. keeps your personal and business data secure and encrypted; both on and offsite to get your business back up and running with the minimum of downtime.

Broadband & WiFi

In our interconnected world your business needs to be online 24/7. Our managed broadband and WiFi will provide quick, quality connection to get the job done. Speak to our sales team to get connected.

Connection Monitoring

By monitoring your internet connection, we can detect any problems and respond to them before they become major issues, keeping you connected and working towards your goals.

Phone and CCTV Systems

Digital phone systems provide you with premium features and flexible plans that grow with your business, from single handsets to full office installations. Ask us about an HD CCTV system and access control to monitor your premises and keep your offices as secure as your data.

Hardware

Providing best value is what we are all about. When it comes to advice, supply and installation of new hardware we make sure you get the best options for your business. We can even arrange finance to help you spread the cost and manage your budgets.

Remote Support

Our helpdesk team are on hand, from Monday to Friday 8:30am – 5:00pm, to provide free, friendly remote support to make sure you can get your IT back on track in no time.

Testimonials

As a long-term client of Remedian, Ashworth Electrical Services have nothing but the highest praise for their assistance in managing our IT systems.

Ashworth Electrical

The service Remedian provide is professional and efficient. The staff are always helpful and friendly.

Oldham Coliseum Theatre

Remedian have been our IT support providers now for almost 6 years. During that time they have demonstrated a high level of customer service and value for money support and IT equipment.

Analytical Technology

Remedian have helped us grow into the company we are today. The standard of service and expertise Remedian provide us with is second to none, whether it is remote helpdesk support or onsite maintenance.

Breakey and Nuttall

The Remedian team have provided weekly on-site technician services and have also provided strategic direction in relation to the Trust's infrastructure which has been invaluable. When issues arise the Remedian team are fast to respond and are proactive in recommending solutions to mitigate any potential issues.

BEBCMAT Trust