In short: Bought on its own, without a full managed contract. For businesses whose own IT team covers the working day and needs the hours it cannot, or a second pair of hands through a project, a vacancy or a period of leave. Your team keeps ownership of the estate, the roadmap and the change process. We cover an agreed window against runbooks and escalation rules you approve, with a UK-based engineer on call rather than an answering service, and every action written up and handed back the next working morning.

Who this is for
  • Your IT team covers the working day and nothing after it
  • One person is currently the out-of-hours plan, formally or otherwise
  • The business runs shifts, nights or weekends while IT works days
  • You are carrying a vacancy, long-term absence or parental leave
What it costs to leave it

An out-of-hours arrangement that depends on one person’s goodwill works until the night they are asleep, abroad or have had enough. It is also one of the more common reasons good internal IT people leave, and replacing them costs considerably more than covering the hours would have.

Who this is for

Not businesses looking for managed IT. If you want somebody to take on the estate, that is a managed contract and it is priced differently. This is for the situations where IT is already handled and the gap is measured in hours:

  • An internal IT team that covers office hours and nothing after them
  • A single IT person who is currently the out-of-hours plan
  • An operation running shifts, nights or weekends while IT works days
  • A team carrying a vacancy, long-term absence or parental leave
  • A business that wants its estate monitored without changing who runs it
  • An in-house team that wants escalation cover for a major project or migration

The 3am problem

Most in-house IT teams do not have an out-of-hours plan so much as an out-of-hours person. Somebody has a phone, and an expectation, and no formal arrangement covering what happens if they are asleep, abroad, unwell or simply have had enough of being the plan. It works until it does not, and the failure is usually discovered during the incident it was supposed to cover.

It is also a retention problem that rarely gets named as one. Being permanently on call without a rota, compensation or a backstop is one of the more common reasons good internal IT people leave, and replacing them costs considerably more than covering the hours would have.

The other half of the problem is that nothing is watching. A team covering office hours is not monitoring overnight, so a failed backup job, a degrading disk or an unusual sign-in at 2am is found the next morning at the earliest, and sometimes not until it matters.

What the cover includes

  • Defined out-of-hours coverage windows, agreed around your operating pattern
  • 24/7 monitoring and alerting across servers, endpoints and network
  • A UK-based engineer on call, not an answering service raising a ticket for the morning
  • Agreed escalation path into your team, and agreed authority to act without waking them
  • Documented runbooks for your estate, written during onboarding rather than improvised at 3am
  • Incident write-ups the next working morning, so your team keeps ownership

Where the boundary sits

On-call cover only works where both sides know exactly what the on-call engineer may do without asking. Publishing that boundary is not a disclaimer, it is the part that makes the arrangement safe to buy:

  • Your team keeps ownership of the estate, the roadmap and the change process
  • We work to your runbooks and escalation rules, not around them
  • Anything outside agreed standing authority is escalated rather than actioned
  • Every out-of-hours action is written up and handed back the next working day

Standing authority is agreed system by system during onboarding. Typically it covers restarting a failed service, failing over to a secondary, isolating a compromised endpoint or restoring from backup, each scoped to named systems. Everything else escalates. If a provider will not define this list with you, they are asking you to trust an unbounded mandate on your production estate in the middle of the night.

An extra pair of hands, not a takeover

The same arrangement covers the daytime version of the problem: a migration that needs more hands than the team has, a vacancy between hires, a period of leave, or a project where the internal team wants specialist escalation available without handing the work over.

This is co-managed IT in its narrowest form. The full range of arrangements, from this through to a provider taking the estate on entirely, is set out in MSP vs internal IT, which is worth reading if you are still deciding how much you want to hand over.

What it costs

Priced against the coverage window, the size of the estate and how much standing authority the on-call engineer holds, so it is quoted rather than published. A single agreed window costs materially less than genuine round-the-clock cover, and most businesses start with the former.

We publish a real per-user rate for managed IT under 50 users on the pricing page, and we are not publishing one here, so it is worth saying why rather than leaving it as an omission. A single figure would have to assume a coverage window, and the difference between weeknight evenings and genuine round-the-clock cover is large enough that any published number would mislead one buyer to flatter another.

If you are comparing providers

Three questions separate real out-of-hours cover from the appearance of it. Who physically answers, and are they an engineer or a message-taking service. What are they contracted to do when they answer, and what can they do without waking your team. And what happens to the incident record, so your team is not reconstructing the night from scratch the next morning.

The wider set of questions worth putting to any IT provider is in how to choose an IT support company, written to work as well against us as against anyone else.

Frequently asked

Can we buy out-of-hours IT support without a full managed contract?

Yes. That is the specific purpose of this arrangement. It is bought instead of a managed contract rather than as an upgrade to one, by businesses whose own IT team covers the working day perfectly well and needs the hours it cannot. Your team keeps ownership of the estate, the roadmap and the change process; we cover an agreed window against runbooks and escalation rules you approve. Nothing about your day-to-day arrangements has to change for it to work.

Is the on-call engineer a real engineer or an answering service?

A UK-based engineer who can start working on the problem, which is the distinction worth pressing every provider on. A large amount of what is sold as 24/7 IT support in the UK is an out-of-hours answering service that takes details and raises a ticket for the morning team. That has a legitimate use, but it is a message-taking service rather than cover, and the difference only becomes apparent during the first serious incident. Ask any provider, including us, who is awake, where they are, and what they are contracted to do when they answer.

What can the on-call engineer do without waking our IT manager?

Exactly what you have agreed in advance and nothing beyond it. Standing authority is defined during onboarding: typically things like restarting a failed service, failing over to a secondary, isolating a compromised endpoint or restoring from backup, each scoped to named systems. Anything outside that list is escalated to your nominated contact rather than actioned. Getting this boundary written down is the part that makes on-call cover safe to buy, and a provider that will not define it is asking you to trust an unbounded mandate at 3am.

Can you cover a vacancy or a period of leave?

Yes, and it is one of the more common reasons businesses start. A single IT person going on extended leave, a resignation with a gap before the replacement starts, or a parental leave period all create the same problem: an estate that was covered by one person and now is not. Time-boxed cover works well here because the scope is clear and the end date is known. Several businesses that started this way have kept a narrower ongoing window afterwards, having discovered what was previously going unwatched overnight.

Do you need to replace our monitoring tools?

Not necessarily. Where you already run monitoring that gives adequate coverage and can alert us, we can work from it. Where coverage has gaps, or where alerting cannot reach an external on-call rota, we will say so and propose what is needed rather than quietly accepting a feed we cannot act on. What we will not do is take responsibility for responding to incidents on an estate we have no reliable visibility of, because that is an arrangement that looks like cover and is not.

How much does out-of-hours IT support cost?

It is quoted rather than published, because the coverage window moves the price more than anything else. Cover for a single agreed window, weeknight evenings, or weekends, or a defined seasonal peak, costs materially less than genuine round-the-clock cover, and most businesses start with the former and widen it later if the incident pattern justifies it. The other variables are the size and complexity of the estate and how much standing authority the on-call engineer holds. Tell us your operating pattern and we will scope it.

Tell us your operating pattern

When does your team stop, when does the business not, and what has gone wrong in that gap before? That is enough for us to scope a coverage window.

Scope a coverage window