What we mean by “managed IT.”
Managed IT is a flat monthly arrangement where we take responsibility for your technology. A managed engagement isn’t a help line you call when something breaks, and it isn’t a contractor you hire by the hour. We’re the team that owns your environment day to day.
Most of our managed clients are Middle Georgia businesses with somewhere between 10 and 150 users. Construction firms, specialty trades, distributors, engineering shops, agribusiness suppliers, small manufacturers. Businesses that depend on real infrastructure, not just laptops and email.
We also do co-managed work for businesses where there’s already an internal IT person or team and we plug in to fill specific gaps. That’s a different conversation, and there’s a separate page for it.
What’s included in a managed engagement.
Every business is different, but here’s the core of what a fully managed CoreSouth engagement covers. Some of these are everyday work. Some you’ll never think about until they matter.
Helpdesk and end-user support. Your team gets a real person on the other end. Someone who can fix the issue, explain what happened, and follow through if it needs more attention later. We don’t bounce tickets between tiers for the sake of looking busy.
24/7 monitoring and alerting. We watch your servers, network equipment, and critical workstations around the clock. If something goes sideways at 2am, we know about it before you do. A lot of issues get resolved before anyone in your office logs in the next morning.
Patching and updates. Operating systems, applications, firmware. Patched on a defined schedule, tested where it matters, and documented. Skipping patches is how businesses get hit with ransomware. We don’t skip them.
Backup and recovery. Backed up, verified, and tested. We don’t just set up backups and hope. We run actual restore tests, because a backup you haven’t tested is a guess.
Cybersecurity tooling. Endpoint detection and response (EDR), email security, multi-factor authentication (MFA), security awareness training for your team. The fundamentals that cyber insurance underwriters now require, plus the things that go beyond what they ask for.
Microsoft 365 administration. User provisioning, license management, mailbox configuration, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, the security and compliance side. If you’re on Microsoft 365 (most of our clients are), we manage it.
Network and server management. Switches, firewalls, wireless access points, on-premises servers, hybrid cloud. Configuration, monitoring, firmware updates, capacity planning.
Vendor coordination. Internet provider down? Line-of-business software vendor not returning calls? Phone system acting up? We deal with them. You shouldn’t have to translate between three vendors who each blame the other.
Quarterly business reviews. Once a quarter we sit down with you (in person where possible) to look at what we’ve been working on, what’s coming up, what’s getting close to end-of-life, and where the budget conversations need to start. No slides full of jargon. A real conversation about your technology and where it’s going.
Why owners switch to CoreSouth.
Most of our clients didn’t come to us because they were curious about IT. They came to us because something was wrong. A few patterns we hear over and over:
The current provider got bought, and support got worse. Local MSPs in Middle Georgia have been getting acquired by larger regional or national companies for years. The pattern is consistent. The relationship dries up. The response times slow down. The owner who knew your business is gone, replaced by a ticketing system and a rotating cast of remote technicians.
Recurring problems that don’t get permanently fixed. Same printer issue every month. Same VPN drop every Tuesday. Same login problem every time someone new starts. Symptoms get treated, root causes don’t.
Cyber insurance got harder. The questionnaire used to be a page. Now it’s six pages and the underwriter wants documented proof. MFA, EDR, backup testing, incident response plans, security awareness training. The owner can’t fill it out, and the current IT provider can’t either.
An incident exposed a gap. A phishing attack, a ransomware near-miss, a backup that didn’t work when it was needed. Something that should have been covered, wasn’t.
Internal IT walked out. The in-house person left, got promoted, or was always doing IT on top of another job and finally said they couldn’t anymore.
If any of those sound familiar, you’re not alone. We hear them most weeks.
Who managed IT is right for.
We do our best work with businesses that depend on their technology. If your team can’t do their jobs when the network goes down, if your operation runs on Microsoft 365 and a couple of line-of-business applications, if you’ve got servers and switches and a real environment to manage, that’s the kind of work we’re built for.
We’re a particularly good fit for construction and specialty trade contractors, wholesale distributors, architecture and engineering firms, agribusiness suppliers, small manufacturers, and the kinds of administrative businesses (collections, medical billing, claims processing) where the work is administrative rather than clinical.
We work across Middle Georgia: Warner Robins, Perry, Forsyth, Fort Valley, Dublin, Milledgeville, and the surrounding counties.
How a new engagement starts.
The first conversation is a conversation, not a pitch. We want to know what your business does, what’s working, what’s not, and what’s making you consider a change. If we’re a fit, we’ll say so. If we’re not, we’ll say that too.
If we move forward, the onboarding looks something like this. A few weeks of discovery and documentation, where we map out your environment, identify the immediate risks, and standardize what needs standardizing. Then we move into a steady-state managed relationship with the quarterly review cadence baked in. The 90-Day Guarantee covers the early window: if we’re not delivering the value we promised in the first 90 days, you can cancel without penalty.