What is included

Round-the-clock cover applies to incidents, not to every request. Routine tasks are handled during working hours, and rightly so.

Discuss the scope

Emergency intake

A separate number that works at any hour, with no answering machine and no menu.

On-duty shift

People on shift rather than one engineer being phoned at home.

Diagnosis and recovery

Remote connection, restarting services and switching to the backup.

Escalation

Bringing in a specialist and a manager by the agreed procedure if it is not resolved.

Site visit

A night or holiday visit when it cannot be resolved remotely.

Review

After an incident: the cause and the measures to stop it recurring.

How the work runs

Onboarding takes a week: the infrastructure has to be handed to the duty shift and the procedure agreed.

01

Defining what is critical

What counts as an incident. Not everything that breaks at night needs immediate intervention.

02

Procedure

Who to wake, who has authority to stop a service and who is told about progress.

03

Handover to the shift

Documentation, credentials, diagrams and standard recovery scenarios.

04

Operation

Round-the-clock duty, a review of every incident and a monthly report.

Round-the-clock support is pointless without authority. If an engineer finds a problem at night but cannot restart a service without the director approval, the response time equals the time it takes the director to wake up. The authority of the duty shift is agreed in advance.

Frequently asked questions

Work out the cost of an hour of downtime outside working hours. For an office that is empty at night that is zero and there is no need to overpay. For a shop on a Saturday evening or a factory on the night shift it is a direct loss, and the mode pays for itself.

By having a shift. One person cannot be on duty around the clock: they sleep, fall ill and take holidays. An on-duty shift means a rota, cover and handover rather than the heroism of one employee.

All are accepted but handled by priority. An incident is picked up immediately, while a request to install software waits for the working day. The criteria for an incident are fixed in the contract so there is nothing to argue about at three in the morning.

We will set up round-the-clock support

Tell us what is critical and what hours the company works. We will define what counts as an incident and price it.