Trust and transparency
What is includedManaged service vs project work
Most disputes with a supplier come from an unclear boundary. Here is ours, written down before you buy rather than argued about afterwards.
Included in your monthly service
- Proactive monitoring and alerting on databases and data platforms
- Incident response within the published SLA targets
- Backup verification and restore testing to an agreed schedule
- Patching, maintenance and index and statistics upkeep
- Performance tuning of existing workloads
- Capacity, cost and licence position reviews
- Security and configuration hardening checks
- Documentation kept current as the estate changes
- Named engineer plus account lead and monthly service review
- Reasonable ad hoc advice and small change requests
Quoted as project work
Scoped and fixed priced up front, with a written deliverable and an agreed timeline.
- Migrations to Azure, Fabric or a new database platform
- Greenfield data warehouse, lakehouse or reporting builds
- Bespoke software, portal or integration development
- Formal audits and assessments with a written deliverable
- Large scale consolidation or version upgrade programmes
- New Power BI or Power Platform solution design and build
- Data quality remediation programmes
- AI and automation solution build and rollout
Outside our scope
We do data. We will happily point you at a trusted partner for the rest.
- End user helpdesk and desktop support
- Network, firewall and physical infrastructure management
- Hardware supply and licence resale
- Third party application support where the vendor holds the contract
- Anything that requires a licence or product we have no access to
The grey areas
A small change that grows
If a request looks like it will exceed the ad hoc allowance we tell you before we start, quote it, and let you decide. We never quietly consume your hours.
An incident caused by a third party
We still respond within SLA and lead the diagnosis. Where a third party owns the fix, we manage the escalation on your behalf rather than handing you a ticket number.
Emergency work outside contracted hours
If you have out of hours cover it is included. If not, we will still help and it is billed at the agreed emergency rate, confirmed with you before we start.
FAQ
Scope questions, answered
- The test is whether the work keeps the existing estate healthy or changes what the estate is. Keeping it running is managed service. Building something new, moving it, or replacing it is project work.
Scope
Want this mapped against your estate?
We will mark up what would sit in service, what would be project work, and what you should keep in house.
What you'll get
- Written scope split
- Indicative pricing
- No obligation
- No hard sell