Business
Mid-market depth: SLAs, ownership, and operational maturity
What Business is for
Business is for organisations where IT downtime is measured against revenue rather than inconvenience. Fifty to a hundred and fifty-plus people, multiple sites, a vendor-heavy environment, and executives who expect posture reported in terms they can act on.
The defining additions are discipline and ownership. Change windows are structured with rollback plans, so a Tuesday update cannot become a Wednesday outage. Disaster recovery is exercised rather than documented. Privileged access is reviewed on a schedule. Vendor coordination for line-of-business applications sits with us, so your team stops being the switchboard between three suppliers who each blame the others.
This tier also carries the runway to add vCIO-led strategy when you are ready. Plenty of Business clients run for a year on operational depth alone before layering Strategic on top, and that sequencing usually works better than buying both at once.
What changes for you
Change stops causing incidents
Structured windows and rollback planning turn the most common self-inflicted outage into a managed risk.
Recovery is rehearsed
DR exercises mean the first time your team runs the runbook is not during the event it was written for.
One accountable party across vendors
Line-of-business application issues get coordinated by us. Your staff stop relaying messages between suppliers.
What's included
Grouped by what it does for the business, rather than by the tools behind it.
Service levels
- Enhanced SLAs with business-critical workload prioritisation
- Executive escalation path that does not route through the standard queue
- 24/7 monitoring with NOC-style triage and incident coordination with your leadership team
- Onsite support for projects, vendor meetings and multi-site coordination
Change and release discipline
- Structured change windows agreed with the business
- CAB-style review and rollback planning for high-impact updates
- Configuration baselines with drift detection
Resilience and continuity
- Backup and DR exercises, not just documentation
- Runbooks written so your operations staff can execute them under pressure
- Recovery objectives agreed per system and tested against them
Security operations
- Ongoing control tuning rather than set-and-forget configuration
- Prioritised remediation backlog reviewed with leadership
- Privileged access reviews on a defined schedule
- Logging and retention patterns that support an investigation
Governance and vendors
- Full Microsoft 365 and cloud governance
- Vendor coordination for line-of-business applications — we hold the thread, not you
- Licence position tracked so renewals are not a surprise
Reporting
- Executive-ready reporting on posture, incidents and investment backlog
- Trend reporting that shows whether things are getting better, not just what happened
Bridges day-to-day excellence with the runway to add vCIO-led strategy when you are ready.
What Business does not include
Worth knowing before a call rather than after one.
- Still not an attestation. We produce evidence and operate controls; auditors certify.
- Multi-year roadmap, board narrative and M&A technology integration sit in Strategic.
- Regulated-environment evidence programmes are Assurance, commonly paired with this tier.
- Bespoke multi-site builds, WAN design and relocations are scoped as Custom SOWs.
Questions about Business
- Growth gives you controls and a quarterly cadence. Business adds operational rigour around change, rehearsed recovery, privileged access review, and vendor ownership — the things that matter when an outage has a measurable cost per hour.
- Usually not at this size. Business works well co-managed, with a documented split: your team owns applications and user-facing priorities, we own infrastructure, security operations and vendor coordination. Ambiguity about ownership is what makes co-managed arrangements fail, so we write it down.
- A scheduled, scoped test against agreed recovery objectives — restoring a defined system to a defined state within a defined window, with your staff executing where that is the realistic scenario. It produces a report of what worked and what did not, and the gaps become backlog items.
- Yes, and it is one of the more valuable parts of this tier. We hold the thread on line-of-business application issues rather than handing your team a case number and stepping back.
How is this different from Growth in practice?
Do you replace our internal IT team?
What does a DR exercise actually involve?
Can you coordinate with our existing software vendors?
Not quite right?
Compare all packages →Is Business 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.