The Hidden Cost of Downtime
Last Tuesday, an accountancy firm in Dorset lost three hours when their server went down. The emergency call-out cost £720. Lost billable hours? Another £3,400. That’s £4,120 for a single afternoon.
When IT systems fail, the impact is immediate. Orders stall, customer queries go unanswered, and staff sit idle. Even a short outage ripples across a week, delaying projects and frustrating clients. In competitive markets, a single failure can push customers towards rivals who appear more reliable.
Why Break/Fix Falls Short
Break/fix support seems attractive because you only pay when something breaks. But you act after the damage is done, often at the worst possible moment. Emergency call-outs average £150-180 per hour. Weekend fixes? Add 50% on top.
We’ve seen it countless times: a break/fix engineer patches the immediate problem, charges for four hours, and leaves. Three weeks later, the underlying issue causes another failure. You’re paying twice for the same problem whilst your team loses confidence in the systems they depend on.
Break/fix creates uncertainty. You can’t predict when the next outage will hit or how severe it will be. That unpredictability makes budgeting difficult and leaves leadership guessing about IT resilience.
The Proactive IT Support Advantage
England & Company, a 28-person accountancy practice in Wimborne, struggled with an unreliable IT solution for years. Staff were kicked off the system up to eight times an hour. They’d created a nominal code just to track system downtime.
We migrated them to a properly configured cloud solution over a single weekend. Monday morning, the team arrived to find systems that actually worked. Director Cheryl Lawes told us: “Sentinel have restored confidence in our IT and our ability to provide a great service to our clients.”
That’s what proactive support delivers. We monitor systems 24/7, apply patches before vulnerabilities become breaches, and plan capacity to prevent failures. Managed services replace sporadic emergencies with predictable monthly fees.
How Sentinel Delivers Resilience
Our managed services combine continuous monitoring, automated maintenance, and strategic planning. We start by fixing urgent problems: patch compliance, backup verification, endpoint protection. Then we layer on strategic improvements that drive long-term resilience. We map your critical services, identify high-risk components, and prioritise improvements that deliver immediate value. When England & Company needed secure home working during the pandemic, their infrastructure was already ready. No panic, no disruption.
Making the Switch
Moving from break/fix to proactive support doesn’t have to be disruptive. We handle the transition methodically, ensuring stability whilst introducing safeguards. The transformation becomes visible quickly.
The question is simple: do you want to pay for failure or invest in resilience? Break/fix belongs in the past.
Book a free IT assessment to see where your infrastructure sits and what we’d prioritise first.
