We already signed with our provider for the network. Can you still help us?

If you have a term agreement for a managed network, you are not stuck with nothing until it expires, and you should not feel you have to justify the decision to us. Carrier managed networks get bought for sensible reasons and the hardware is generally good.

What we cover alongside it: your computers, your Microsoft 365 or Google environment, email security, backup, your line of business software, printers and copiers, phones, the user support that your staff actually generate day to day, security awareness training, documentation, and the planning and budgeting side. That is the large majority of what an office experiences as IT, and almost none of it is in a managed network contract.

What we do about the boundary, which is the part that needs attention in a split arrangement:

• We talk to your provider so you do not have to. With your authorization on the account, we raise the tickets, provide the technical detail, and chase. Your office manager relaying packet details between two companies is how these arrangements go wrong.
• We document what they manage as well as what we manage, so there is one picture of your environment rather than two partial ones.
• We agree the incident plan in advance. Who declares, who can authorize a containment change, how everyone reaches each other out of hours. This genuinely matters and almost nobody has it written down.
• We will tell you when something is their problem rather than quietly absorbing it, because you are paying them for it.

And when the term ends, you have a real choice rather than an automatic renewal. Tell us three to six months out and we will price the alternative properly, tell you what the equipment situation is, and lay out the honest tradeoff. Sometimes the answer is to renew, particularly for a multi-site business that values the circuit and the network coming from one place. Our job is to make it a decision rather than something that happens to you.

One practical note: find your renewal date and the notice period now, and put them in a calendar. Auto renewal with a notice window you missed is the single most common reason businesses stay on an arrangement they had already decided to leave.