Everything your business needs to stay running, secure, and out of IT trouble — for a flat monthly fee.
The most common question we get from businesses evaluating managed IT is some version of "okay, but what am I actually paying for?" Fair question. The managed IT category is broad enough that two providers can call themselves MSPs and deliver completely different things. Here's exactly what's in a NerdSquad managed IT plan, with no marketing fluff.
Every device in your environment — workstations, servers, network equipment — gets a lightweight agent installed that monitors it around the clock. We see disk failures before they happen, catch abnormal processes before they become incidents, and push patches automatically on a schedule that doesn't disrupt your business day.
This is the foundation everything else is built on. If you're curious how the monitoring layer works, our RMM dictionary entry explains it in plain English.
When something breaks, your team reaches us through roughly ten channels: phone, text, email, chat, portal, you name it. We don't make you route everything through a ticketing system before a human looks at it. Two-tier support (not three) means you get to a real technician faster, not a script reader who escalates you.
Response times are defined in your contract and we clear them by a significant margin in practice. For the full picture, see our articles on what your SLA actually means and how quickly we respond.
Operating system patches, third-party software updates, firmware — all handled on a schedule, tested before deployment, and applied in maintenance windows that don't land in the middle of your business day. Unpatched systems are one of the top three attack vectors in SMB breaches. This is one of the unglamorous things that matters enormously.
Every managed device runs EDR — not just antivirus. There's a meaningful difference: antivirus checks files against a list of known bad things. EDR watches behavior continuously, detects anomalies in real time, and can isolate a compromised device before an incident spreads across your network. It's the security guard watching the cameras, not just the bouncer at the door.
Encrypted, offsite backups on a schedule appropriate to your recovery time requirements — and tested. A backup that's never been restored isn't a recovery strategy. We verify that your backups actually work, and we document recovery procedures before you need them. Our BDR article covers the architecture in detail.
Most businesses run on a stack of 5–15 software and hardware vendors. When something breaks that involves a vendor — your internet provider, your phone system, your line-of-business application — we make the call, speak the technical language, and ride the ticket to resolution. You don't spend two hours on hold with your ISP trying to describe a routing problem.
User provisioning, mailbox management, security hardening, Teams configuration, SharePoint permissions — included for clients on Microsoft 365. When someone joins your team, their account is ready. When someone leaves, access is revoked the same day. Our Office 365 Support service handles the full stack.
Firewalls, switches, wireless access points, VPN configurations — monitored and maintained. We handle firmware updates, access control lists, and network health monitoring. When your ISP has an outage, we know before you call us.
Depending on your plan tier, this includes phishing simulation training, security policy documentation, and for regulated industries — HIPAA, GLBA, PCI-DSS — the technology-side compliance documentation your auditors and examiners will want to see. For a full picture of what compliance support looks like for regulated clients, see our healthcare IT and financial services IT pages.
No plan is everything. Project work — major infrastructure upgrades, office buildouts, new server deployments, large-scale migrations — is typically quoted separately. Some specialized application support falls outside managed IT scope depending on the platform. We'll tell you what's in and what's out before you sign, not after.
One monthly fee. Everything monitored. Fast helpdesk. Patches handled. Backups tested. Security built in. Vendors managed. And a team that knows your environment before something goes wrong, not after.
For more on how managed IT differs from break/fix or in-house IT, see What's the Difference Between Managed IT and Break/Fix? and our MSP dictionary entry.