A Managed Service Provider (MSP) is a business that manages another business’s IT, its networks, devices, software, security, and support, under a recurring contract. Instead of hiring an internal IT team, you outsource day-to-day IT operations to a specialist company for a predictable monthly fee.
Equate Group is an MSP. Most of our clients are UK small and medium businesses who prefer proactive, expert-run IT to either doing it themselves or hiring a full-time in-house team.
What an MSP typically covers
- Helpdesk support, your team’s day-to-day “my laptop won’t connect” problems
- Proactive monitoring, watching systems for warning signs before they become outages
- Patching and updates, keeping software current and secure
- Backup and recovery, making sure you can come back from a disaster
- Cyber security, from anti-malware through to Cyber Essentials certification
- Strategic planning, advising on hardware refreshes, cloud migrations, and software choices
- Procurement, sourcing and configuring new kit
How MSP pricing works
Most MSPs use a per-user-per-month or per-device-per-month model. You know what next month’s bill looks like before it arrives. This is different from the old “break-fix” model where you only paid when something broke, which incentivised the IT company to wait for problems rather than prevent them.
See our pricing page for how we think about cost.
When an MSP is the right choice
An MSP usually makes sense for businesses that:
- Have 5–200 employees (too small for a full IT team, too big to leave IT to chance)
- Want predictable monthly costs rather than surprise invoices
- Need broader expertise than one or two internal people can realistically cover (support, security, networking, cloud, compliance)
- Rely on IT enough that a day of downtime is a real business problem
- Want strategic IT thinking, not just someone to fix the printer
How MSPs differ from other IT suppliers
| MSP | Break-fix | Single contractor | Internal team | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Monthly fixed | Per incident | Hourly or retainer | Salaries |
| Proactivity | High | Low | Varies | High |
| Breadth | Wide | Narrow | Narrow | Wide |
| Cost predictability | High | Low | Medium | High |
| Scaling with business | Easy | Manual | Limited | Slow |
How we help
Equate Group offers end-to-end managed IT from our Buckinghamshire base, see our managed IT service for what that looks like in practice, our IT support page for the helpdesk side specifically, and the about page for our approach.