Frequently Asked
Questions

Call us directly, or log a ticket through our helpdesk platform — whichever works best for you. We'll pick it up as quickly as we can.

How quickly we respond, and what happens next, depends on the service level agreement included in your support contract. We offer different response tiers to suit different businesses and budgets — from next business day for lower-priority issues, through to prioritised out-of-hours response for clients whose operations depend on immediate resolution.

When we agree your contract, we make sure you understand exactly what's covered and when, so there are no surprises. We work on a best endeavours basis and won't make guarantees we can't keep — but we do take out-of-hours support seriously for clients on the appropriate contract tier.

No. We're happy to start with an initial term of six months — long enough for us to get properly embedded in your systems and for you to see the value in what we do, but not a lengthy commitment before we've had the chance to demonstrate it.

Many clients move to a rolling monthly arrangement after the initial term, once they're satisfied with how things are working. We'd rather earn your continued business through the quality of what we do than retain it through contract terms.

We'll always be transparent about what's in any agreement before you sign it. If something isn't clear, ask us — we'll explain it in plain English.

It genuinely depends on where you're starting from — and before we can give you an honest answer, we need to understand that.

We begin every Cyber Essentials engagement with a survey and review of your existing setup: your devices, network configuration, access controls, software, and patching status, measured against the five NCSC controls. From there, we'll give you a clear picture of what needs to change and a realistic estimate of how long it's likely to take to implement.

Some organisations are closer than they think. Others have more to address. Either way, we'll be straightforward with you before any work begins — no inflated timescales, no unnecessary complexity. Once changes are in place, the certification assessment itself is relatively straightforward. We handle the preparation; you focus on the business.

Break-fix support — calling someone when something stops working — is reactive by design. Help only arrives after the damage is done: after the system is down, after the data is at risk, after your team has lost hours of productivity, and after your clients may already know something went wrong.

Managed support works differently. We monitor your systems continuously, apply security patches before vulnerabilities can be exploited, and identify warning signs before they become incidents. Problems that would otherwise surface as failures are caught and resolved quietly, in the background, without any disruption to your business.

There are also less obvious differences. A break-fix engineer typically arrives without knowing your systems, your history, or your business priorities. With a managed support partner, the people handling your IT know your setup in detail — which means faster resolution, fewer repeat issues, and better decisions about how your technology should evolve.

We don't make guarantees about what can or can't go wrong — no responsible IT provider does. But the evidence from businesses that have moved from reactive to managed IT is consistent: fewer incidents, shorter resolution times, and meaningfully lower risk to the business and its reputation. We work on a best endeavours basis in everything we do.