“99.9% uptime” appears in almost every IT proposal. It sounds reassuring, but it rarely describes what you will actually experience. Uptime figures usually refer to the provider’s own systems, measured their way, and the compensation for missing them is often a small credit that comes nowhere near the cost of a lost day. What your team feels is something else entirely: how long a problem lasts once it starts.
Response and resolution: the numbers that matter
- Response time is how long until a qualified person is actively working on your problem. Not an automated email — a person.
- Resolution time is how long until the problem is fixed, or a workaround gets people working again.
- Escalation is what happens when the first person cannot fix it: who takes over, and how quickly.
A failed backup caught the same day is a minor task. The same failure caught three weeks later, when you need to restore, is a crisis. The difference is not uptime — it is how quickly someone noticed and acted.
Not every problem is equally urgent
A good support agreement sets targets by priority, so the urgent things get attention first:
- Critical — the business cannot work: email down, internet out, the main system unavailable.
- High — a team or an important function is affected, but work can continue.
- Normal — one person has a problem.
- Requests — new starters, software installs, changes.
Ask your provider for a response and resolution target for each level, in writing, and how they handle a critical issue outside office hours.
Measure it, or it is just a promise
Targets only mean something if they are tracked. Ask for a regular report showing tickets by priority, how quickly each was responded to and resolved, and anything that missed its target and why. Patterns in that report — the same printer every week, the same user every month — point to problems worth fixing properly.
The fastest response is the one you never need
Proactive monitoring catches many problems before anyone phones: a disk filling up, a backup that failed overnight, a firewall going offline. When monitoring is done well, the provider is often already working on an issue by the time your team notices it.
What to put in your agreement
- Response and resolution targets for each priority level.
- Hours of cover, and what out-of-hours support includes.
- How issues are reported: phone, email, portal, WhatsApp.
- A monthly or quarterly report on performance against those targets.
Our own commitment is a first response in under four business hours. See how our managed IT support works, or talk to us about what your business needs.