The Management Service Agreement
A three-year term with a written service level agreement. Not because long contracts are good for us, but because the work that makes a network stable does not fit inside twelve months.
Why three years
The first year of any managed engagement is spent undoing accumulated decisions. Documentation gets built, monitoring gets tuned, backups get proven, unsupported equipment gets replaced and the design gets corrected where it was wrong. That work is expensive and most of its benefit lands later.
The second year is when a properly engineered network stops producing incidents, and the support relationship gets quiet. The third year is when lifecycle planning pays: hardware is refreshed on your schedule instead of on a failure, circuits are renegotiated from a position of knowledge, and licensing is consolidated.
A one-year agreement prices in the risk that none of that gets finished. Everyone ends up paying for the uncertainty.
The term also changes how we behave. Under break-fix, a provider earns more when your network is unstable. Under a fixed agreement, every incident costs us. Our incentive and yours point the same direction, which is the entire point.
What the MSA defines
- The covered environment, asset by asset
- What sits explicitly outside coverage, and why
- Service levels by severity: response and restoration targets
- Support windows, and what after-hours coverage includes
- The escalation path, with names
- Change control and approval authority
- Onboarding milestones and when full service levels begin
- Business review cadence and what is reported
- How out-of-scope work is authorized and billed
- Both parties’ obligations, including yours
- Termination, transition assistance and data return
The MSA replaces our standard published rate schedule for covered work. Out-of-scope work is quoted and authorized separately before it starts.
Three coverage levels
Tiers differ by coverage window, response commitment, monitoring depth and how much proactive engineering is included. Pricing is set per environment after the assessment, because a fourteen-node single site and a five-building campus are not the same job.
Managed Essentials
For single-site organizations with a stable environment and standard business hours.
- Business-hours support window
- Availability and performance monitoring
- Firmware and patch management on a defined cadence
- Configuration backup and change records
- Carrier and vendor ticket handling
- Defined response targets by severity
- Annual business review
- Asset and lifecycle register maintained
Managed Complete
For organizations where downtime has a direct operational cost, including most community associations and professional firms.
- Everything in Managed Essentials
- 24/7 response for critical severity
- Carrier-edge monitoring and trending
- Named escalation path with direct engineer access
- Backup monitoring with scheduled restore testing
- Security posture review on a defined cycle
- Quarterly business review
- Included proactive engineering hours
- Documented annual failover test
Managed Critical
For multi-site operations, high availability requirements and environments with a regulatory or contractual obligation.
- Everything in Managed Complete
- 24/7 response across all severity levels
- Shortest restoration targets we offer
- Diverse access design with tested failover
- Dedicated primary and secondary engineers
- Continuity plan maintained and exercised
- Monthly reporting, quarterly executive review
- Priority scheduling for project work
- Annual continuity and recovery exercise
Tier contents are indicative and the executed agreement governs. Robert: confirm the exact inclusions, hour allowances and response targets per tier so these match the MSA template.
What an SLA has to contain to be real
Plenty of agreements use the phrase without committing to anything. These are the five elements we consider non-negotiable, and all five are in ours.
A response target, defined precisely
Not “prompt.” A stated maximum time from ticket receipt to a qualified engineer engaging, differentiated by severity, with the clock start defined.
A restoration target
Response is the easy commitment. Restoration is the one that matters, stated as a target with the dependencies that can suspend the clock named honestly.
An escalation path with names
Who you call, who they escalate to, and at what elapsed time escalation happens automatically without you having to ask for it.
A measurement method
How performance is measured, over what window, from which system of record, and how it is reported to you. An unmeasured commitment is a slogan.
A remedy
What happens when we miss. A service level with no consequence attached is a statement of intent, and both sides know it.
Exclusions, stated up front
Carrier outages, utility power, force majeure, customer-caused changes and unsupported equipment sit outside the service level. We name them in the agreement rather than invoking them during an incident.
Fair questions about a three-year term
What if the relationship is not working?
The agreement contains termination provisions, including termination for cause where we fail to meet our commitments. It also obligates us to provide transition assistance and to return your documentation, credentials and configuration in a usable form. A long term should not mean a hostage situation, and an agreement that traps a client produces a client who will never refer you.
Can we start smaller than a three-year MSA?
Yes. An assessment is a standalone engagement with no obligation attached, and project work such as a build-out or a migration can be contracted on its own. The MSA is how we structure ongoing support, and it is not a prerequisite for talking to us.
Our HOA board turns over. Can they be bound for three years?
Association contract terms are governed by your documents and by Florida law, and boards vary in what they can commit to. We work with your management company and your association counsel on term, renewal and cancellation language. This is a normal conversation for us, not an obstacle. Nothing here is legal advice, and your counsel should review any agreement before the board signs it.
What happens at renewal?
Renewal is a conversation held well before expiration, informed by three years of documented performance against the service levels. By that point you have the data to decide, and so do we.
Does the MSA cover everything, including hardware?
The MSA covers labor and management for the named environment. Hardware, licensing, carrier services and third-party subscriptions are separate, and the agreement says which is which. Anything outside the defined scope is quoted and authorized before work begins, never discovered on an invoice.
Ask for the agreement before you need it.
We will walk you through the actual MSA and SLA language, clause by clause, before anyone talks about signing. If a commitment does not read clearly to you, it is not written well enough.