Who picks up at 2am, and have they seen our network before?

The honest mechanics, because this is the part of a service agreement people only test on the worst night of the year.

How the rotation works. One of our technicians carries the after hours phone on a rotating schedule, and there is a named backup behind them. If the person on call does not pick up, it goes to the backup rather than to voicemail. They are our employees, they have your documentation in front of them, and in a company our size they have very likely worked on your systems in daylight.

What reaches them without anyone calling. Monitoring alerts come through regardless of whether anybody at your office noticed. A server that stops responding, a failed backup, a circuit that drops at 2am. Security alerts from our monitoring platform reach the on-call person the same way, through our security operations center partner, who escalate to us rather than to you.

What counts as an after hours emergency. Business down, essentially: a server or circuit down, nobody able to reach email, a location offline, a line of business system unavailable, or a suspected security incident. There is an article in this topic that defines business down properly. For managed clients that is covered by the agreement rather than being a billing conversation at 9pm, and there is an article on that in Pricing.

A password reset at 11pm is not an emergency. Call it in, it gets handled in the morning, and nobody will be short with you about it.

The honest limitation. We are six people. That is a rotation with a backup, not a staffed overnight desk with someone sitting at a console waiting. On a quiet night, nobody is awake. The phone wakes somebody up, and the commitment is that it is one of us and that we answer. That arrangement covers an enormous amount of what small businesses actually need at night, and it genuinely is not the same thing as a 24-hour manned operations center.

If your business truly requires a staffed overnight desk, a hospital or a round the clock operation where somebody is working at 3am every night, say so when we talk. We will tell you honestly whether what we have fits, and if it does not we will say that rather than sell you something and hope.

One thing to agree in advance, whoever your provider is: who at your company we are allowed to wake up. If we see something at 2am that needs a decision, it helps a great deal to already know whose phone to ring and who can authorize us to take a system offline.