Call Us Today. (510) 900-3100
Managed IT Services
A Proactive Approach to Small Business IT
"Managed IT" can mean very different things from one provider to the next. Some run a help desk that picks up the phone when something breaks. Others quietly mark up their tooling and lock you into multi-year contracts before you've seen what they actually deliver. The label is the same, but the experience is not.
Laurel Networks takes a different approach. We focus on preventing problems before they reach your team — and on earning your business every month, not securing it with a contract.
What Proactive Looks Like in Practice
The word "proactive" gets used a lot in this industry. Here's what it actually means in our day-to-day work.
Continuous monitoring with real engineers behind it.
Servers, workstations, network, and cloud services watched around the clock. Alerts route to engineers who know your environment, not to a generic queue.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR).
Modern endpoint security that goes well beyond traditional antivirus, with managed threat hunting backed by a 24/7 security operations center.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace administration.
User lifecycle, security baselines, conditional access, license optimization, and ongoing tuning. Most of the security wins for a small business live in this layer — and most of the gaps too.
Patch and update management on a tested schedule.
Operating systems, applications, and firmware stay current — applied in a controlled way that respects your business hours and avoids the "the update broke everything" Monday.
Backup health monitoring and recovery testing.
Backups are only useful if they actually restore. We monitor backup integrity daily and test recovery on a regular cadence.
Strategic check-ins, not just tickets.
We meet with you regularly to review what's working, what's coming up, and where we'd recommend investing or pulling back. IT decisions get made with a plan, not in a panic.
Transparent Pricing
We bill a flat monthly fee per user. Our core operations toolset — monitoring, endpoint security, ticketing, remote support, and documentation — is included. You don't license any of it separately, and there are no surprise invoices.
Pricing is set at engagement and reviewed once a year, so you can budget with confidence.
No Long-Term Contracts
Most managed IT comes with one- to three-year contracts. We don't do that. The relationship is month-to-month, and you stay with Laurel Networks because the service is working — not because you signed something.
It's a discipline. It keeps us focused on actually delivering, every month.
Who It's For
Managed IT Services is designed for businesses with 5 to 50 employees in the Bay Area — Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, San Leandro, Castro Valley, San Francisco, and Marin.
We work with companies that have outgrown break-fix support and want IT to fade into the background instead of becoming a recurring distraction.
Who It's Not For
We're not the right fit for everyone. If you're under 5 employees and rarely touch IT, an as-needed model probably serves you better. If you're shopping primarily on price, there are MSPs who will quote less than us — and the gap usually shows up in security depth, response time, or what happens when something goes wrong. We'd rather not be that gap.