Illustrative solution brief · Proposed selections
See how a proposed co-managed service preserves the internal team's business knowledge while adding operating capacity. Define the responsibility split, choose the supporting tools and verify the handoff before expanding the work.
The challenge
Give your IT team help with maintenance and more complex work, with clear responsibilities and one route for support requests.
Illustrative 60-user organization with an internal IT lead and an established ticket system.
Give your IT team help with maintenance and more complex work, with clear responsibilities and one route for support requests.
Defined co-managed work with retained first-line support; focused visibility/logging improvements use the existing approved tools.
Every count, product selection, implementation and financial input below is illustrative. Actual customer results and realized ROI/profit have not been supplied.
Start with the work people need to do, the information they handle and the systems they already use. Check security, compatibility, support and recovery needs before comparing costs.
For candidates that pass the gates, score functional fit 30%, operational maintainability 25%, integration and data portability 20%, three-year total cost 15%, and supplier/support resilience 10%. These are proposed weights, not completed vendor test results.
Run a representative pilot, negative tests and recovery exercise. Price hosting, retention, patching, engineering, support, training and exit. A lower license bill wins only when the complete solution meets the requirement.
Inventory entitlements and use tools the operators already support before adding another recurring subscription.
Alternative and decision trigger: Replace them only after pilot evidence identifies missing capabilities or a lower complete cost. Open-source tools do not replace every remote-support or endpoint requirement.
Reuse built-in event collection where suitable; evaluate a Zabbix pilot for agreed service visibility.
Alternative and decision trigger: Compare current commercial monitoring and endpoint offerings against support, integration and actual operator effort. Retained Windows licensing remains in both paths.
Agree which team handles support requests, updates, account access, changes and emergency decisions.
Alternative and decision trigger: An all-inclusive MSP model is a different scope. Compare only quotes with the same retained internal work, coverage and supported assets.
The customer retains first-line support and approvals; agreed recurring and engineering work is assigned to L8DT.
Asset state, selected events, changes and unresolved tickets are visible through approved access.
Monthly review converts recurring ticket themes and gaps into prioritized customer decisions.
Baseline tickets and maintenance, confirm tools and split responsibilities.
Exercise a ticket, a patch decision, a removal request and an escalation.
Confirm support access and asset coverage; maintain the original queue and revoke pilot access on rollback.
Document procedures, train backup operators and revisit recurring effort against the agreed scope.
These are required pilot checks, not tests already completed for a customer.
60-user co-managed service and visibility component. $5,700/month is the proposed L8DT 60×$95 base; the extra infrastructure allowance is synthetic.
USD, 36 months, no discounting or inflation. The commercial assembly is hypothetical, not a vendor quote. Open-source license assumptions apply only to the selected community component; paid platforms, support and hosting remain explicit.
| Input or result | Hypothetical commercial assembly | Proposed L8DT assembly |
|---|---|---|
| One-time setup | $5,000 | $7,000 |
| Monthly licenses | $600 | $0 |
| Monthly infrastructure/storage | $100 | $250 |
| Monthly operating service | $6,000 | $5,700 |
| Customer operator effort / month | 30 hours | 32 hours |
| Monthly cash outlay | $6,700 | $5,950 |
| 36-month cash TCO | $246,200 | $221,200 |
| 36-month economic TCO incl. valued effort | $316,400 | $296,080 |
$25,000 over 36 months; 10.15% of the commercial cash TCO.
11.3%. Formula: (commercial cash TCO − proposed cash TCO) ÷ proposed cash TCO. This compares hypothetical avoided expenditure with the proposed component investment.
3 months. Formula: round up positive additional setup ÷ positive recurring monthly cash difference. No interest or time value included.
$7,000 in year one; $9,000 per subsequent year. Assumes the modeled costs are recognized as operating expenses, equal revenue and unchanged other costs. Capitalization, depreciation and taxes may change accounting profit.
2 additional customer hours/month at $65/hour. Valued effort is not a payroll saving. Economic benefit including effort: $20,320. Add 30% to proposed operating-service cost: 36-month cash advantage becomes $-36,560.
Actual implementation, measured ROI and realized profit: NOT PROVIDED. No revenue uplift, avoided breach, uptime improvement or staffing reduction is assumed.
Retained internal staffing, endpoint/application licenses, hardware, projects, on-site work, 24/7 human support and taxes are excluded equally. Quoted extras are added before a real comparison.
A signed scope and current supplier quotes replace these assumptions before any service commitment.
The intended result
Exercise support escalation, maintenance ownership and the operating review with both teams. Confirm actual staffing and costs for the engagement; modeled time savings and delivery margin are illustrative.
Define the actual assets, permissions, coverage, costs and acceptance with a Service Champion.