What is the difference between managed IT and break-fix?

These are the two fundamentally different ways to buy IT support, and the difference matters a great deal for both your costs and your stress levels.

Break-fix

You pay each time something breaks, usually by the hour. There is no monitoring, no prevention and — importantly — no incentive for anyone to stop problems happening, because the provider only earns when things go wrong. Costs are unpredictable, and a serious failure can mean expensive emergency work, long downtime, and scrambling to reach someone who's available.

Managed IT

You pay a fixed monthly fee, and the provider proactively monitors, secures, patches and supports your systems to prevent problems in the first place. Support is included, so day-to-day issues don't come with a bill attached, security is handled continuously, and your costs are predictable and easy to budget.

The incentive difference is the real story

Under break-fix, a provider quietly benefits when your systems fail — more failures, more billable hours. Under managed IT, that's flipped: because we're paid the same whether or not things break, a smoothly running, secure business is entirely in our interest. Our incentives point the same way as yours.

Which works out cheaper?

Over time, managed IT almost always works out cheaper and far less disruptive, because prevented problems cost nothing and downtime is the real, hidden expense of break-fix. Break-fix can suit a very small or low-dependency setup, but for most Perth businesses of 10 or more staff, managed IT is clearly better value. For a full side-by-side, read our managed IT vs break-fix guide, or call (08) 9325 1196.