I am struggling with the design of a managed services plan for servers. What is normally covered and what isn’t? Would a MS plan cover the labor to recover from a catasropic failure that requires days to recover from? They don’t happen often but they do occur.
This is a great question. Unfortunately, the answer will vary greatly depending on who you ask. Some MSPs have different levels of service depending on the client, others just have a one size fits all approach.
Ultimately, you have to decide your service offering based on cost of services sold, your target market, and a few other factors.
We’ll be having a pricing session in Chicago that will deal with this exact topic if you’re interested.
Charles
We generally do not include onsite-emergency response within our contracts. Rather we include remote remediation up to a certain period of time. Once we determine that the efforts will run into the "hours" mark then we escalate to an onsite resource. The onsite time is then handled on a T&M basis. What we do offer is an onsite response of within 4 hours.
A lot of MSPs will tell you that you need to include the onsite time within the contract as this is what the customer is paying for. The reality is though; that if you ensure that your customers network follows best practices (solid backups, antivirus, fault tolerant servers under warranty, etc.), you proactively monitor using a solid RMM tool, you review the alert and performance reports and make recommendations where appropriate and you respond quickly and efficiently when issues arise, you are doing what the customer is paying for.
There is no reason for you to be held accountable for a hardware or software failure that is completely out of your control.
Lane Smith
Do IT Smarter
What is normally covered and what isn’t? Would a MS plan cover the labor to recover from a catasropic failure that requires days to recover from?
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A good BDR plan/solution should remove the possibility of a ‘catastrophic failure that requires days to recover’ in the smallest business or largest enterprise.
If it is not an ‘act of god’ crater where the computer room used to be, you should be 100% up and running within a very short period of time. Hours at most. Like two. Three if it happens at lunchtime.
Pat Cannon
Mad River Systems
Good point Pat. I think it will also depend on the nature of your service agreement and your available resources as a MSP.
Many MSPs are partnering with firms that help clients get back on their feet after a major event (storm, earthquake, power outage, etc.). These are areas where it would typically go beyond a managed services agreement but the MSP is finding a lot of trust placed in them by their clients.
Charles
Thank you very much for this information.
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