Managed IT or break/fix: which one does your business need?

What each one actually is

With break/fix you have a problem, you call, someone dials in or drives out, and you pay for the work. There's no relationship between incidents, and nobody is looking at anything while things are working.

With managed IT there's a monthly agreement, and monitoring, updates, security and backup run whether or not anything has gone wrong. When something does break, dealing with it is already covered.

The cost answer, since that's probably why you're here

The comparison people want is an hourly rate against a monthly fee. The number that usually decides it is what a day of downtime costs your business.

If a computer being down for a day is an inconvenience, break/fix is very likely the better buy and no monthly fee will beat it. If a day down stops the business, the arithmetic favours being looked after whatever the two rates are, because what you're buying is the days that don't go wrong.

When break/fix is genuinely the right answer

It's the right answer more often than an IT company will admit: two or three people, a handful of computers that don't depend on each other, no server and no one system the whole business stops without, nobody outside asking what security controls you have, and somebody in-house comfortable enough to keep the backups running and the updates applied.

If that's you, paying every month to prevent an outage you could absorb is cover for a risk you don't really carry, and calling someone when something breaks is the cheaper answer.

When it stops being the right answer

When more than a handful of people depend on the same system, so one failure stops several of them at once. When you hold other people's information, which for the businesses we look after means patient records, client files and card details. And when an insurer, a larger customer or a regulator starts asking what you actually have in place.

We ran the break/fix side, and we closed it

Triad started as a walk-in repair shop and became a managed services business, so all of that comes from having worked the model rather than from competing with it. What it can't do is look at the things that predict a failure, because between one call and the next nobody is looking.

The difference that has nothing to do with price

Break/fix produces no evidence. When it's over, nobody can show that updates were applied, that the backups were tested rather than merely running, that security software was on every machine rather than most of them, or that your staff were ever trained. Nothing was being recorded, so there's no record.

That has stopped being an abstract problem. Cyber insurance applications now ask what controls you have, and renewals ask again. Larger customers send security questionnaires before they will share data with a supplier. Some contracts require specific measures in writing. All of those want evidence rather than assurance, and a claim can be read back against what you said on the application.

Managed work produces that record as a by-product of doing the work. Break/fix can't produce it afterwards, because nothing was recorded in the months in between.

Where the shop down the road stands in this

Plenty of break/fix providers are very good at the work. The model aims at a different problem, and for the business described above it's the better buy.

If break/fix is right for you, buy it well

We sell the ongoing kind, so this isn't us. We don't have a local firm we can point you to, and we're not going to name one we haven't vetted. Either way, here is what we would tell a neighbour.

Get the hourly rate, the minimum charge and the after-hours rate in writing early, while nothing is broken. Ask who will hold your passwords and administrator access, and make sure you hold them too. Make sure your backups run whether or not anyone is watching, and restore something from one once a year to prove it works. And work out who you'd call late on a Friday before you need to.

If the other one is right for you

What we cover, how it works and how you'd start is on the managed IT page. If you're weighing quotes, read per user or per device first, because the basis moves the bill more than the headline figure does.