Essentials
Ideal for small teams that are past “break-fix”
What Essentials is for
Essentials is the on-ramp to proactive operations. The distinction that matters against Core is not the volume of tickets — it is that work starts happening before you ask for it. Patching runs to a calendar you can see, hardware gets flagged before it fails, and recurring issues get a root cause rather than a repeat visit.
This is the tier where documentation becomes real. Runbooks your own staff can follow, restore procedures written down, and a record of how your environment is configured that does not live in one engineer's head. That matters more than most buyers expect: it is what stops a provider change from being a hostage negotiation.
Essentials suits fifteen to thirty-five people across one or two sites, leaning on Microsoft 365, with no dedicated internal IT engineer. If a client questionnaire or cyber-insurance renewal is on your horizon, this is the minimum tier we would put you on.
What changes for you
Fewer repeat problems
Recurring tickets get a root cause. The measure of this tier working is a ticket count that falls over the first two quarters.
Answers for security questionnaires
MFA coverage, email authentication and backup testing are the three things clients and insurers ask about most. All three are in scope here.
Documentation you own
Runbooks and configuration records that make your environment portable — including away from us, if it ever comes to that.
What's included
Grouped by what it does for the business, rather than by the tools behind it.
Support and response
- Prioritised helpdesk with same-day response targets for high-impact issues during coverage hours
- 24/7 monitoring with incident triage and documented after-hours escalation paths
- Quarterly review of ticket trends, recurring issues, and the improvement backlog
- Onsite for onboarding, offboarding and project work within the Greater Houston service area
Proactive operations
- Proactive patching calendar with visible compliance status
- Lifecycle tracking and refresh guidance for aging hardware, so replacement is planned rather than urgent
- Runbooks and documented procedures your team can follow without us
- Root-cause work on recurring tickets instead of repeat fixes
Security baseline
- MFA enforcement patterns across the user base, not just on request
- Baseline endpoint hardening and policy templates
- Email authentication guidance — SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and monitored
- Joiner, mover and leaver process so access changes track employment
Backup and recovery
- Backup and recovery tested on priority systems, not merely configured
- Documented restore procedures your team can execute
- Retention aligned to what your business actually needs to keep
Microsoft 365
- Group hygiene and guest access reviews
- Sharing defaults set deliberately rather than left at whatever the tenant shipped with
Scoped to your environment—conversation first, not a generic checklist.
What Essentials does not include
Worth knowing before a call rather than after one.
- No quarterly business review with roadmap and budget alignment — that is Growth.
- Conditional Access and device compliance policies are not configured at this tier.
- After-hours escalation is documented, but there is no dedicated on-call engineering rotation.
- Compliance evidence packages for an active audit are out of scope — see Assurance.
Questions about Essentials
- The patching calendar becomes visible and enforced, MFA moves from advisory to enforced, and we start a documented improvement backlog reviewed quarterly. The helpdesk feels similar; the work happening behind it does not.
- It covers what most policies ask about at this size — MFA, tested backups, endpoint protection, email authentication. Where insurers ask about Conditional Access, privileged access review or documented incident response, you are into Growth or Assurance. Send us the questionnaire and we will tell you plainly which tier it implies.
- Yes, though co-managed arrangements usually fit better at Growth or Business where ownership boundaries are defined more formally. At Essentials we typically are the IT function.
- Projects are scoped as a separate SOW with milestones and acceptance criteria. Your managed tier covers steady-state operations; a project has a defined start and finish, and we will not blur the two into an open-ended bill.
What actually changes on day one versus Core?
We are renewing cyber insurance. Is Essentials enough?
Do you work alongside an internal IT person?
What happens if we need a project — an office move or a server replacement?
Not quite right?
Compare all packages →Is Essentials the right fit?
Twenty minutes with an ECS engineer, and an honest answer either way. If a different tier suits you better, we will say so.