Break-fix means you pay when something breaks. Managed IT means you pay a fixed fee to keep it from breaking. Here is how to tell which one your business has outgrown.
The short answer
Break-fix is paying a technician by the hour when something stops working. Managed IT is paying a fixed monthly fee for someone to monitor, maintain, secure, and support your systems all the time. Break-fix is cheaper in a quiet month and more expensive in a bad one. Managed IT costs the same every month.
Neither is wrong. A two-person office with a couple of laptops can do fine on break-fix. The question is when the risk of waiting for something to break becomes larger than the cost of preventing it.
Five signs you have outgrown break-fix
- The same problems keep coming back. Hourly repair fixes the symptom, because nobody is paid to find the cause.
- Staff have stopped reporting small issues. When every call costs money, people work around problems until they become outages.
- Nobody can say when the backups were last tested. A backup that has never been restored is a guess.
- You have been asked about your security. Customers, insurers, and auditors now ask small businesses how they protect data.
- One person on staff has quietly become the IT department, on top of the job you hired them for.
What managed IT should include
Plans differ between providers, so compare them line by line. At a minimum, look for a help desk your staff can call directly, monitoring that alerts the provider before you notice a problem, patching, endpoint and email security, managed backup with test restores, and help dealing with your other technology vendors.
Ask what is not included. On-site visits, projects such as an office move, and after-hours support are often separate. That is reasonable as long as you know before you sign.
The middle option: co-managed IT
If you already have an IT person, you do not have to choose. In a co-managed arrangement your person stays in charge while an outside team handles monitoring, patching, security tools, and overflow. It gives a one-person department cover for vacations and for the problems outside their specialty.
How to decide
Add up what you spent on repairs, emergency calls, and lost working hours in the last twelve months. Then ask what one full day without email, files, or your main application would cost. If the second number worries you more than a monthly fee would, you have your answer.