The 5 Best IT Support Companies in Manchester

Between roughly £40 and £90 per user per month for fully managed support, and Inology publishes £55, £70 and £85 across three tiers, which is a fair benchmark. Below about £40 you are usually buying reactive support with no proactive monitoring. Above £90 you should be getting security operations, strategy and compliance work rather than a faster helpdesk. Watch for setup or onboarding fees, commonly £500 to £1,500, and for out-of-hours cover being a separate line, which it usually is.

Cyber Essentials is a self-assessment questionnaire verified by a certification body. Cyber Essentials Plus covers the same five controls but adds a hands-on technical audit by an assessor, including vulnerability scans of your actual machines. Plus is materially harder to obtain and is what most public sector contracts and many enterprise supply chains require. Providers are not always careful about which one they claim. Ask which certificate they hold, when it expires, and whether they can take you through Plus if a client demands it.

Two separate numbers, and most contracts only give you one. Response time is how long before a human acknowledges the ticket. Resolution time is how long before the problem is fixed. A 15-minute response with no resolution target is close to meaningless, because an acknowledgement does not restore your email. You want response and resolution targets by severity, a definition of each severity level, the hours those targets apply, and what happens when they are missed. If there is no remedy for a breach, it is a promise rather than an agreement.

Fully managed suits businesses with no internal IT, up to around 50 to 100 users. Co-managed suits businesses with one or two internal people who know the systems and the politics but cannot cover holidays, out-of-hours, or specialist security work. Co-managed is frequently the better value at 50 users and above, because you keep institutional knowledge in the building and buy depth rather than replacing everything. Two providers here name it as a distinct service.

Get this in the contract before you sign, not when you are leaving. You want your Microsoft 365 tenancy and licences in your own name rather than resold through the provider, admin credentials held by you, documentation of the estate, and a defined offboarding process with a fixed cost. The common trap is licences bought through the provider's Cloud Solution Provider agreement, which makes migration slow and gives them leverage. Ask who the tenancy is registered to. If the answer is them, negotiate it now.

Give every provider the same brief: user count, device count, servers, locations, current systems, out-of-hours needs and any compliance requirement. Then compare on total monthly cost per user including setup amortised over the term, the two SLA numbers by severity, named certifications with expiry dates, whether onboarding is included, and who owns the tenancy. Ask each for two references at your size in your sector, and actually call them. The difference between providers is almost never the technology.