Managed IT services for Sydney business. One provider, accountable for all of it.

// Scope

What managed IT services cover.

The monthly fee buys a working IT department, not a menu of extras. Here's what's inside ours, and what should be inside anyone's.

• Helpdesk. A real person your team can call or email when something's wrong, with a stated response time. Not a portal that promises a callback.
• Monitoring. Your machines, servers and network watched around the clock, so failing drives and full disks get caught as warnings, not as Monday-morning outages.
• Patching. Updates tested and rolled out on a schedule. An unpatched computer is the front door left open, and most break-ins walk straight through it.
• Backup & recovery. Every machine and your Microsoft 365 data backed up, with restores actually tested. The detail lives on the backup and disaster recovery page.
• Security. Endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication and email filtering as standard, watched by someone who reads the alerts. More on the cyber security page.
• Cloud & Microsoft 365. Licences at RRP, admin, security baseline and sensible sharing rules, covered on the cloud solutions page.
• Vendor management. When the internet provider blames the phone company and the phone company blames the printer, we own the argument. One number to call, no finger-pointing.

// Helpdesk

Helpdesk with a 60-minute response target.

The target is a real person picking up your problem and starting work within an hour of your call or email during support hours. Not an auto-reply with a ticket number. Here is what that does and does not mean.

• Response is not resolution. Response is how long until someone competent starts. Resolution depends on the fault: a forgotten password and a dead drive are not the same job, and anyone who guarantees the same fix time for both is guessing. The difference is spelled out in what a real IT support SLA looks like.
• Urgent means a phone call. If the whole office is down, ring 02 9707 0999 rather than emailing the general queue. A stopped business, a suspected security incident or a dead server gets picked up ahead of routine work.
• What is not promised. There is no guaranteed on-site arrival time. A small provider who promises two-hour on-site to everyone is promising something they cannot deliver if two customers break at once. You get a realistic booking instead.
• After hours. Emergency support outside business hours is available to customers on a managed plan. Routine requests wait for the next business day.

// Monitoring and patching

Monitoring and patching, done after hours.

An unpatched computer is the front door left open, and most break-ins walk straight through it. Patching is the least glamorous part of managed IT and the part that prevents the most damage.

• What is watched. Every workstation and server on the plan reports disk health, free space, update status, backup status and the errors that show up weeks before an outage does. The network is monitored too, so a link that keeps dropping is found before the phones start complaining.
• When patches run. Operating system and application updates are tested, then rolled out on a schedule outside your working hours. Nothing reboots at 2pm on invoice day.
• How a failing drive is handled. The warning arrives on my side first. You get a plain-English note saying what is failing and a quote before any work happens. Anything beyond the routine is quoted before it is done, not billed after. That rule is written up in what a fair managed IT contract looks like.
• Microsoft 365 is not backed up by Microsoft. Deleted SharePoint files and departed-employee mailboxes are your problem, not theirs. Backup monitoring covers your machines and your Microsoft 365 data, with the detail on the backup and disaster recovery page.

// Security

Security inside the plan, not bolted on.

Every plan carries a security baseline. A cheap plan with security "available as an add-on" is how a small business ends up paying for a breach it was told it was covered against. Here is what is inside the fee on both Essentials and Complete. For the wider picture, read our small business cyber security guide for Sydney first.

• Endpoint protection on every machine. Managed centrally, not a free trial each person installed themselves.
• Multi-factor authentication on email and anything money touches. Email is the master key to every other account. MFA on it stops most account takeovers, and it costs close to nothing.
• Email filtering and mail authentication that passes. Your invoices land in inboxes, and forged ones are far less likely to land in yours.
• Sensible admin rights. Staff get the access their role needs, stamped from a template, not local admin because it was quicker on day one.
• Patching on a schedule. Most break-ins walk through a hole a patch closed months ago. Updates should not depend on someone remembering.
• Backup checks with tested restores. This is the control that turns a ransomware incident into a bad afternoon instead of a bad month.
• Alerts read by a person. Monitoring is only worth paying for when it reaches a human who acts on it. A dashboard of green lights nobody opens is a line item.

When you need more than the baseline, for a tender, an insurer or a board, the Essential Eight gap assessment is a fixed $2,750 ex GST with a prioritised fix list, and ongoing management of a fuller security stack runs from $16.50 per user per month alongside any plan. The service detail is on the cyber security services page.

// Vendors

Vendor management: one number to call.

When the internet provider blames the phone company and the phone company blames the printer, somebody has to own the argument. On the Complete plan, that is me.

Vendor management means your staff never sit on hold to a telco. You ring one number, describe the symptom, and the chasing is done for you: the internet provider, the software vendor, the printer company, the line-of-business app that has stopped talking to the accounting package.

It goes one step further here, because I am also the provider. Business NBN, fibre, fixed wireless and phone services come through our carrier partners, supported by me, on one bill. When the connection drops there is no gap between the IT company and the ISP for the problem to fall into. Details on the business NBN and phone page.

The same logic runs through business VoIP, hosting and cameras. Buying the gear sits with us too: through IT procurement, we plan, source and deploy it, then run the warranty claims. For Wi-Fi, we survey and install business Wi-Fi, and managed Wi-Fi starts at $55 a month ex GST. Vendor management is a Complete inclusion; Essentials covers remote helpdesk, monitoring and patching without it.

// Who this is for

Sydney small and medium business.

The sweet spot is roughly five to fifty staff: big enough that downtime costs real money, too small to hire your own IT person. Offices, practices, trades, warehouses, anyone across the Sydney metro including Parramatta and Western Sydney, with remote support Australia-wide behind it.

Not every business needs this, and I'd rather say so up front. If a dead laptop is an inconvenience rather than a crisis, plain IT support in Sydney, call when something breaks, pay for the fix, may be all you need. We do that too, and we'll tell you straight which side of the line you're on.

Most Sydney businesses come to us from one of three places: a one-person IT contractor who has become a single point of failure, a big MSP where they are account number 4,000, or no provider at all and a staff member who is "good with computers". All three are survivable right up until the day they are not.

// Under fifty seats

Small business MSP: what changes under 50 seats.

Under fifty seats the trade-offs are different from the ones MSP marketing is written for, and it is worth being straight about which way they cut.

• Why per user. You pay a set amount for each person looked after, and that seat covers their computer, their helpdesk access, their security software and their backup. Hire someone, add a seat. Lose someone, drop one. It moves with your team instead of locking you into a retainer sized for last year.
• Why no 24/7 desk on Essentials. A guaranteed overnight desk has to be staffed, and you pay for people sitting ready. Most businesses that clock off at five do not need it. Emergency support outside hours is available on a managed plan for the night the server dies; a password reset at 3am is not that.
• What a one-engineer MSP does better. The person who answers the phone is the person who knows your network. No account manager, no tier-one script, no explaining your setup from scratch to a new technician every call. Continuity and direct access are the whole point.
• What it does worse, honestly. When two customers break at once, someone waits. A big MSP has more bodies; it also has you as account number 4,000. I would rather tell you there is no guaranteed on-site arrival time than promise one I cannot keep for everyone.
• When you are too small. Two or three people with laptops and everything in Microsoft 365 usually do better on ad-hoc support at $140 per hour. The monthly model starts paying for itself around five staff, or the day you take on a server, compliance obligations or work where an hour of downtime costs billable money.

The small business IT support page has the published pricing and what a plan does and does not cover. How to choose a managed IT provider covers pricing models and the red flags.

// Settings

Who this suits: offices, practices, trades, warehouses.

That one-line list hides four quite different jobs. Here is what usually breaks in each and what the plan does about it. These are patterns, not case studies, and no client is named.

• Offices. Five to fifty people, everything in Microsoft 365, a shared drive that has become the filing system, and one person who "does the IT" between their real job. What breaks: sign-in loops, OneDrive not syncing, shared mailboxes that go quiet, and a departed staff member whose account nobody closed. The plan puts admin rights, licences and offboarding on a template so those stop being surprises.
• Practices. Anyone holding sensitive records, which in practice means legal, accounting and health settings. What breaks is rarely the hardware. It is the compliance question nobody can answer on the spot: where is the backup, who can read the files, is MFA on. That work carries logging, retention and reporting, and it belongs in the price up front rather than as a surprise later. A practice cannot trade with the booking system down, so a dead front-desk machine is treated as urgent rather than routine.
• Trades. A ute, a phone, a laptop at home and a quoting app that has to work on site. What breaks: the phone that holds the business, the home WiFi the invoicing runs over, and a domain and licences registered under whoever set them up. The plan documents what you own, puts MFA on the accounts, and makes sure the laptop and the phone are backed up somewhere that is not the laptop and the phone. Where the work happens in a shed or a yard the WiFi does not reach, the answer is network design that covers it rather than another extender. See WiFi site surveys.
• Warehouses and workshops. Sheds, racking, concrete and heat. What breaks: WiFi that dies past the third aisle, a comms cabinet in an unventilated cupboard shortening drive life all summer, and a power blip that corrupts a database mid-write. The plan pairs monitoring with the physical fixes: proper WiFi design instead of another extender, a UPS on anything that matters, and surge protection before storm season.

// Where

Managed IT across Sydney: Parramatta, Western Sydney, the CBD and beyond.

Most of a managed plan is delivered remotely, because monitoring, patching and helpdesk work do not care where the desk is. On-site is for the physical jobs. Here is where those visits go, with travel included in the quote inside the on-site area.

• Parramatta and Greater Western Sydney. Parramatta, Blacktown, Seven Hills, Castle Hill, Baulkham Hills, Rooty Hill and Mount Druitt. Offices, warehouses and workshops in this belt tend to bring the physical jobs: comms cabinets that run hot, WiFi that does not reach the back of the building, and racks nobody has labelled. The local page is IT support Parramatta.
• Penrith, St Marys and the Nepean. Penrith, Emu Plains, St Marys, Kingswood, Cranebrook, Glenmore Park, Werrington and Jamisontown. The local detail, including heat, mixed NBN technology and storm-season power, is on the IT support Penrith page.
• The CBD and inner west. The CBD, the inner west and the surrounding business districts are inside the on-site area.
• Northern, southern and eastern Sydney. Covered on-site by arrangement, with timing agreed when the job is booked. Remote cover is identical wherever you are.
• Several sites. One provider across all of them, and the second and third sites are not penalised for distance. Multi-site problems are usually network and identity problems, which are remote work anyway.
• Everywhere else in Australia. Remote. Monitoring, patching, backups, security work, cloud administration and the large majority of everyday faults are resolved in a secure remote session while you watch. Remote is the default even for customers a short drive away, because it is faster for you and cheaper than a callout.

Further out, any travel component is stated in the quote before you agree to it, never as a line on the invoice afterwards. Anything physical, meaning hardware, cabling, WiFi coverage and cameras, needs hands, and that is the honest limit. The full list, and what remote support honestly covers, is on the service areas page.

// Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 under an MSP.

Microsoft 365 is the right call for almost every small business for email, calendars and documents. What matters is who sets it up and who watches it afterwards.

• Licences at RRP. You pay for management and support, not a margin on software. Business Premium is roughly $38 per user per month at RRP, and whether that sits inside or outside a per-seat quote moves the number by about a third, so ask.
• Security baseline from day one. Multi-factor authentication on, sensible sharing rules, no admin accounts left open, and mail authentication that actually passes.
• Administration included. New starters, leavers, shared mailboxes, licence changes and the why-is-Outlook-doing-that tickets are part of the plan on both Essentials and Complete. See shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 and common Outlook problems for the kind of thing that comes up.
• Backup, because Microsoft does not do that part. Deleted SharePoint files and departed-employee mailboxes are your responsibility, not Microsoft's. Microsoft 365 backup is $5.50 per user per month and closes that gap.
• Migration without lost mail. Moving from old email, Google Workspace or an ageing Exchange server runs out of hours. Your team finishes Friday on the old system and starts Monday on the new one.

The full picture, including Azure and hybrid, is on the Microsoft 365 and cloud management page. Setting up business email properly from scratch is covered in business email setup.

// The process

How the engagement works.

• Free consult. A conversation about what you run, what hurts and what it's costing you. No obligation, and you keep the advice either way.
• Audit. A proper look at your machines, network, licences and backups. This is where the surprises get found, on paper instead of during an outage.
• Fixed quote. One monthly number with the inclusions written out, plus a short list of anything that genuinely sits outside it. No "brace yourself" pricing.
• Onboarding. Monitoring and security tooling rolled out, documentation built, credentials secured, quick wins fixed in the first weeks.
• The ongoing rhythm. Helpdesk during business hours, patching on schedule, backups checked, and a plain-English report so you can see what you're paying for.

// Switching

Changing MSP without the drama.

The fear that keeps people with a provider they have stopped trusting is the handover. It is a manageable piece of work, and we have done it often enough to know where it goes wrong.

• Audit first. We document what you actually have before anything changes. Surprises found here are cheaper than surprises found later.
• Credentials and ownership. Domains, Microsoft tenancy, licences and DNS get moved into accounts you own. This is the step bad providers stall on, and the reason to start it early.
• Overlap where possible. If the outgoing provider will cooperate, we overlap. If they will not, we rebuild the documentation from the systems themselves.
• Nothing switches on a Friday. Obvious, and routinely ignored.

// Fixed fee

Fixed-fee IT support: what the flat fee covers, and what it never will.

A fixed fee only works if both sides know where the edge is. Ours is one number per user per month, set after the audit, and it does not move because you had a bad month. The trade is simple: I carry the risk of a busy month, you carry none of it, and neither of us argues about whether a twenty-minute fix counts as a ticket.

If a quote you are comparing puts patching, security or backup outside the fee, it is not a fixed fee. It is a seat price with the real cost waiting in the projects column. The guide to what a fair managed IT contract looks like covers the clauses that keep a flat fee flat, and what a real IT support SLA looks like covers the response times behind it.

// Plans

Plans and inclusions, without the games.

Every plan we quote is built from the same inclusions list: helpdesk with a stated response time, monitoring and patching, endpoint protection, backup with tested restores, and reporting you can read. What moves the number is headcount, servers, security depth and how fast you need answers, not line items smuggled in later. Watch for quotes that price the seats and treat patching, security or backup as extras: the front-page figure is marketing, not the cost of keeping you running.

How Sydney pricing actually works, per-user models, what pushes the number up and down, and the traps in cheap quotes, is covered in our plain-English guide to what managed IT services cost in Sydney. Your exact number comes as a fixed quote after the free consult and audit, and it stays fixed.

Indicative pricing ex GST, based on current Sydney market rates. Hardware and software licences are billed at cost, and large projects such as a migration or an office move are scoped separately rather than absorbed into the monthly fee.

What a Sydney provider typically charges.

For context, so you can sanity-check any quote including ours: managed IT for a Sydney small business generally lands between $80 and $150 per user per month, with providers offering a deeper security and compliance package quoting up to around $250 per user per month. A ten-person business with a full security baseline is typically looking at $1,200 to $2,500 per month ex GST all in.

Two ends of that range are worth naming. Under about $60 per user per month, something has usually been removed: the support is offshore, or it is break/fix wearing a subscription badge, or the security and backup inclusions are not actually in there. Above roughly $200 per user per month for a small business without unusual compliance obligations, you are often paying enterprise pricing for an SMB service.

Two things rarely appear on the front page of a proposal. Most providers charge a one-off onboarding or audit fee, commonly $1,500 to $5,000 in Sydney; ours is from $550 because the audit is the thing being paid for rather than a setup tax. And check whether Microsoft 365 licences sit inside or outside the per-seat price, because Business Premium alone is roughly $38 per user per month at RRP and quietly moves a quote by a third either way. The levers that push a quote up or down, headcount, servers, security depth, response speed, after-hours cover and compliance, are worked through in the guide to what pushes a managed IT quote up or down.

// Which plan

Essentials or Complete?

Both plans are built from the same inclusions list, so the comparison is honest. What changes is how much of the day-to-day lands on my desk instead of yours.

Swipe sideways on a phone to see both plans.

Service delivery is ITIL-aligned, with agreed service levels, and asset, licence and warranty tracking sits behind both plans in documentation you keep.

Not in either plan, deliberately: hardware and software licences are billed at cost, and large projects such as a cloud migration, an office move or a new server build are scoped and quoted separately. Rolling those into a monthly fee is how providers end up quietly rationing the work.

Essentials suits a team that mostly needs someone competent watching. Complete is the tier most five to fifty seat businesses land on, because on-site visits and vendor management are where the hours go. There is no 24/7 overnight desk on Essentials.

Per-user pricing and what pushes the number up or down is in the plain-English guide to managed IT costs in Sydney.

// Answers

The questions at the top of this page, answered.

Those questions are the ones to put to any managed IT quote, including this one. Here is how we answer them.

• Capped or unlimited? Essentials covers remote helpdesk. Complete makes it unlimited, and the inclusions list says so in writing.
• Response time, in writing? Reply within one business hour, Monday to Friday 8:30am to 5:30pm, with a 60-minute response target on the helpdesk. No guaranteed on-site arrival time, on purpose.
• Who owns the licences, domains and passwords? You do. Domains, Microsoft tenancy, licences and DNS sit in accounts you own from onboarding onwards.
• When was a backup last test-restored? Restores are tested on a schedule as part of the plan, not assumed, and that is the line to check on any other quote.
• Who actually answers the phone? Angus, directly, with 20 years behind it. No account manager, no tier-one script, no explaining your setup from scratch to a new technician every call.
• How do we leave? Everything is documented and the documentation is yours. No lock-in, no data hostage, and how to leave is written down.

How Sydney managed IT pricing actually works, and what to ask every provider →

// Questions

Managed IT services, your questions answered.

// Pairs well with