Service 03
Managed services
Someone whose actual job is keeping your systems working. Written response times, one named engineer, and a monthly allowance for the small changes that otherwise wait a year.
The problem this solves
A mid-sized company usually ends up with three or four systems that matter and nobody who clearly owns them. The person who set them up has left, or is busy, or was the vendor and the contract ended. So the systems run untouched until something breaks, and then everybody improvises.
The symptoms are recognisable: nobody knows when the last backup was tested, security updates are months behind, one server is still running because somebody is afraid to reboot it, and a small change request has been waiting since last Ramadan.
Inside the service
What you get
1. Support
A single place to report a problem, and a written response time by severity. Not “24/7” as a marketing word, but a specific commitment we sign.
| Severity | Meaning | We respond within |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Critical | The business cannot operate. Nobody can invoice, dispatch or log in | Agreed per client, including outside working hours where the contract says so |
| 2 — High | A major function is broken, there is a workaround | Agreed per client, within the working week |
| 3 — Normal | Something is wrong but the work continues | Agreed per client |
| 4 — Request | A change or a question | Next monthly cycle |
The working week is Sunday to Thursday. Out-of-hours cover is a separate, priced option, and we would rather you buy it deliberately than assume it.
Ramadan and the Eid holidays. Our hours shift with yours, and we agree the arrangement in the contract rather than discovering the mismatch in week one. If your business runs harder during Ramadan — retail, logistics, food service, hospitality all do — say so, because that is when you need the cover most and when everybody’s staffing is thinnest.
2. Monitoring, so we find it before your customer does
We watch the things that actually predict an outage — disk, memory, error rates, failed jobs, expiring certificates, backups that reported success but wrote nothing. When one of them moves, we act. You hear about it from us.
3. Security and compliance upkeep
Operating-system and dependency patching on a schedule, access reviews, and the housekeeping that PDPL now makes a real exposure rather than a policy document: where personal data sits, who can reach it, and what leaves the Kingdom. SDAIA has issued 48 enforcement decisions, with fines reaching SAR 5,000,000 per violation.
4. Backups you have actually seen restored
Backups run everywhere. Restores are the part nobody tests. We test one on a schedule and write down the result, so the answer to “can we recover?” is a date rather than an opinion.
5. A monthly allowance for small changes
An agreed number of engineering hours per month for the requests that are too small to be a project and too annoying to live with. A new field, another report, one more user role. Unused hours roll over one month. This is the part clients tell us they value most, because it is the queue that never moves anywhere else.
6. A quarterly written report
What broke and why, what we changed, what is getting worse, and the one thing we would fix next if it were our money. Two pages, in language a general manager can act on.
Taking over a system somebody else built
We do this, and without insisting on a rewrite first. It starts with a paid one-month assessment: we read the code and the infrastructure, find what is undocumented, list what is dangerous, and give you a written statement of what it costs to keep alive and what it costs to replace. If you choose to replace it, the assessment fee comes off that project.
Terms
- Term
- 12 months, reviewed every quarter
- Price
- A fixed monthly fee, quoted after the assessment
- Named engineer
- One person owns your account and knows your setup, with a named backup so a holiday is not a crisis
- Escalation
- A named second contact, and a founder’s number for severity 1
- Exit
- 90 days’ notice. On the way out we hand over documentation and brief your next provider. We do not hold access as leverage
What we will not pretend
- We are not a 24/7 network operations centre. We are a small senior team. Out-of-hours cover is real but it is rostered people, not a room with screens, and we price it honestly.
- We do not do desktop IT. Laptops, printers, Wi-Fi and mailbox resets are somebody else’s job and there are good local firms for it. We cover the systems your business runs on.
- We will not take on a system we cannot support safely. If the assessment says the risk is unmanageable at any sane price, we will say so and decline.