Response times in writing
Every ticket priority carries a written target that is printed in your agreement and reported against every month. When we miss one, it appears in the same report rather than quietly disappearing.
Managed IT without the black box.
Why Nichelytics
Four things we put in writing before you sign anything.
Most managed service relationships fail on ambiguity rather than on technical ability. So we removed the ambiguity first, and everything else follows from it.
Itemised, flat-rate pricing
One per-user rate covers the managed stack. Project work is quoted and approved before it starts. There are no billable minutes for a password reset and no line items you have to ask us to explain.
Named engineers, not a queue
You get a lead engineer and a named backup who know your systems, your users and your quirks. You will not re-explain your environment to a stranger every time something breaks.
Documentation you own
Diagrams, credentials, licences and runbooks live in a system that belongs to you. Ask for an export on any day, including the day you decide to leave, and you will have it within a week.
Core services
One provider for the whole stack, one number to call.
Eight managed services, sold as one agreement so that no fault can be handed back to you as somebody else’s problem.
Transparent process
What the first ninety days actually look like.
No provider can promise a smooth transition, but every provider can tell you the order of events. Here is ours, including the parts that take longer than anyone would like.
Before you commit
The assessment is yours whether or not you sign. It is your information about your business, and holding it hostage would be a strange way to open a relationship built on trust.
Discovery call
45 minutesWe ask what breaks, what it costs you when it does, and what you have already tried. You get a straight answer on whether we are a sensible fit, including when the honest answer is that you do not need us yet.
Environment assessment
Week oneWe inventory every device, account, licence and network path, then document what we find. You receive that assessment whether or not you go on to sign anything, because it is your information about your business.
Written proposal and pricing
Week twoScope, exclusions, response targets and the per-user rate, on paper, with the exclusions written as plainly as the inclusions. Any remediation needed before we can support the environment is quoted separately and up front.
Onboarding and documentation
First 30 daysMonitoring, backup, endpoint protection and identity controls are deployed in a fixed sequence. Your team meets the engineers who will be answering their tickets, and every system is documented as it is brought under management.
Steady state and monthly review
OngoingA monthly report covering tickets, response times against target, patch coverage, backup test results and spend, followed by a quarterly session on what to fix, retire or plan for next.
Security and compliance
The controls we run, and what each one is actually for.
Security spending is easy to sell and hard to verify. These are the specific controls included in every agreement, described plainly enough that you can check we are doing them.
Least-privilege access control
People get the access their role requires and nothing beyond it. Permissions are reviewed every quarter and every administrative account is separated from its owner’s day-to-day login.
Managed detection and response
Endpoint agents watch for the behaviour that precedes an incident rather than only for known file signatures, and alerts reach a human around the clock instead of an unattended inbox.
Patch and vulnerability management
Operating systems, browsers and third-party software are patched on a published schedule. Scan findings are ranked by exploitability and given a remediation date you can hold us to.
Immutable, tested backups
Backups are held off-site in storage that a compromised administrator account cannot delete, and we restore from them quarterly so the recovery times we quote are measured rather than assumed.
Security awareness training
Short quarterly training with realistic phishing simulations, reported by team so you can see where the risk actually sits. Results inform coaching, never disciplinary action.
Rehearsed incident response
A written plan naming who decides, who communicates and who executes, tested annually with your leadership so the first rehearsal is not the real event.
One honest caveat. A managed service provider cannot hand you a certification. What we can do is run and evidence the technical controls that HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2 and CMMC ask for, and be straight with you about which obligations remain yours. Any provider promising more than that is selling something.
In their words
What clients say when we ask what changed.
The monthly report was the thing that sold us and it is still the thing we value most. We can see exactly what was raised, how quickly it was answered and what it cost. Our previous provider sent an invoice and nothing else.
Dana Whitfield
Operations Director, Regional accountancy practice
They inventoried our whole environment before quoting and told us two of the upgrades we had budgeted for were unnecessary. Handing back money in the first fortnight is not the usual sales approach, and it bought a lot of trust.
Marcus Ellery
Practice Manager, Multi-site healthcare clinic
We had a failed server on the Friday of a peak week. The restore worked because they had been testing it quarterly and showing us the results, so nobody had to find out on the day whether the backups were real.
Priya Raman
Head of Technology, Online retail and fulfilment
Questions we get asked
The answers, before you have to ask twice.
If something here is vague, that is a fault worth telling us about. Ambiguity in an IT agreement always costs the client rather than the provider.
How quickly will someone actually respond?
Priority 1 issues, meaning anything that stops the business working, are acknowledged by an engineer within 15 minutes, around the clock. Priority 2 issues affecting an individual or a team are answered within one business hour. Standard requests are answered within four business hours. These are acknowledgement targets by a person who can act, not an automated ticket receipt, and our performance against them is published in your monthly report.
What is actually in your SLA?
A priority definition table so there is no argument about what counts as urgent, a response target for each priority, monitoring and escalation commitments, maintenance windows, and the specific exclusions. It also names your lead engineer and the escalation path by role, up to and including the founders. You see the full agreement before you are asked to sign anything, and nothing in it is conditional on a separate document you have not read.
How does pricing work, and what falls outside it?
A flat monthly rate per supported user covers the managed services, the helpdesk and the monitoring. Hardware, third-party licences and project work sit outside that rate and are quoted individually before any work begins. There are no per-ticket charges, no minimum increments, and no after-hours premium on incidents that we are already contracted to monitor. If a quote changes, you are told why before it is invoiced.
Which tools do you use, and do we own them?
We standardise on established remote monitoring, endpoint protection, backup and documentation platforms, and we will name every one of them during the proposal rather than describing them as our proprietary stack. Licences bought for your environment are recorded in your name where the vendor allows it. Your documentation, credentials and asset records are exportable at any time, and they leave with you if you do.
How long does onboarding take?
Thirty days for a typical environment of up to around 150 users. Week one is assessment and documentation, week two brings monitoring, endpoint protection and backup under management, weeks three and four cover identity, access review and remediation of anything urgent the assessment turned up. Larger or more heavily regulated environments take longer, and we will tell you that before you sign rather than after.
What does support look like day to day?
Your team reaches the helpdesk by phone, email or chat and speaks to an engineer, not a call router. Tickets are visible to you in a portal from the moment they open. Routine maintenance is scheduled outside your working hours, and you get a monthly report plus a quarterly review with the person accountable for your account rather than an account manager reading from it.
Find out what your IT should actually cost.
Book a 45-minute discovery call. You will get a straight answer on whether we are a sensible fit, and an assessment of your environment that is yours to keep either way.
