What a managed IT contract covers
Managed IT means we run the day-to-day of your technology so your people do not have to think about it. In the UAE this is usually written as an annual maintenance contract, an AMC, and the words are used interchangeably.
It covers four things:
- Support that answers. A helpdesk your staff can reach by phone, email or WhatsApp, with agreed response times by severity rather than a vague promise to get back to you.
- Monitoring and prevention. Servers, network, backups and endpoints watched continuously. Most outages announce themselves for days first. The point of an AMC is to act in that window.
- Patching and security hygiene. Operating systems, firmware, antivirus and firewall rules kept current, on a schedule, with a record of what changed.
- Backup and recovery you have actually tested. A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a backup. We test yours and tell you how long a real recovery would take.
Project work sits outside the AMC. A migration, a new office fit-out or a system replacement is quoted as a 28-day cycle so the running cost stays predictable and the project cost stays visible.
What makes this different from most AMCs
Three things, and they are the three complaints we hear about previous providers.
A named engineer who knows your estate. Not a rota of whoever is free. Someone who remembers that your accounts machine has the old scanner driver and that the warehouse switch is the one that overheats in August.
Numbers at the quarterly review. Tickets raised, time to first response, time to resolve, what broke twice, what we changed so it stops breaking. If the numbers are bad we show you the bad numbers. A review that is always green is a review nobody is doing.
An asset register you own. Every device, licence, renewal date and credential, in a document that lives with you. When clients leave a provider, this is the thing they usually cannot get back, and it is the thing that makes leaving expensive. We hand it over by default.
What it costs
Managed IT in Dubai is usually priced per user or per device, per month. Which one suits you depends on how many machines each person touches: a company where everyone has a laptop and a phone prices differently from a warehouse where fifteen people share four terminals.
What moves the number:
- How many users and how many servers
- Whether you need out-of-hours or weekend cover
- How much of your estate is in the cloud versus on site
- Whether you are in a regulated sector with evidence requirements
- The state of what you already have, which is why we audit before quoting
We will not quote a monthly figure from a phone call. The first step is a short audit that tells you what you actually have, what is at risk, and what it costs to run properly. You get that document whether or not you sign anything.
Who this suits
Companies between twenty and five hundred people who have outgrown the arrangement where one capable person in finance also looks after IT. Usually the trigger is an incident that took three days to resolve, or an auditor asking a question nobody could answer.
It also works well alongside an internal team. We commonly take infrastructure, security and out-of-hours so the in-house people can stay on the applications and relationships they know better than we ever will. The split gets written down before we start.
Asked before,
answered straight
What is the difference between an IT AMC and managed IT services?
In practice, very little. AMC is the contractual term used across the UAE for an annual agreement covering maintenance and support. Managed IT is the international term for the same thing, usually with more emphasis on monitoring and prevention rather than fixing what has already broken. Ours is written as an AMC and delivered as managed IT: we would rather stop the outage than respond quickly to it.
How quickly do you respond?
Response times are agreed by severity and written into the contract. A site down or a security incident is treated differently from a printer that will not pair. What matters is that the targets are specific, measured, and reported back to you every quarter rather than quietly forgotten.
Can you support our existing systems, or do we have to change everything?
We support what you have. A provider whose first recommendation is to replace your estate is quoting for a project, not an AMC. If something genuinely needs replacing we will tell you why, what it costs and what happens if you wait, and you decide.
What happens if we want to leave?
You get the asset register, the documentation, every credential and a structured handover. Nothing about how we work is designed to make leaving difficult, because a contract people stay in because exit is painful is not a contract we want.
Start with the audit.
One cycle, fixed price. You get a written picture of what you have, what is at risk and what it costs to run properly. Whether you then sign an AMC is a separate decision.