What is the real difference between break-fix and managed IT?
The real difference is who carries the responsibility for keeping systems healthy. In break-fix, you carry it and the provider reacts when you call. In a managed service, the provider carries part of it for the scope you agree.
That changes incentives. Under pure break-fix, a provider is paid when things break. Under a managed contract, a provider is paid to keep things running, so preventing faults is in its interest. Neither model guarantees good service. The contract wording, the response targets and the reporting decide how it works in practice.
ITIL describes incident management as restoring normal service operations swiftly after a disruption. Both models respond to incidents. The managed model adds the monitoring and routine upkeep that reduce how often they occur.
When does break-fix cost more than a managed service?
Break-fix costs more when failures are frequent, urgent or linked to each other. Each emergency visit carries its own call-out, parts and urgency, and unplanned downtime has a cost that never appears on the repair invoice.
It costs less when little goes wrong. If your environment is small, your equipment is recent and you have a spare device on hand, paying a recurring fee for cover you rarely use can be poor value. Work out how often something failed in the last year and what each outage cost before deciding. Do this with your own records rather than a general rule.
- Count incidents over a full year, not a quiet quarter.
- Include the cost of lost work, not just the repair bill.
- Check what a managed contract excludes, since on-site visits, hardware and projects are often billed separately.
Where do field services fit with a managed service?
Field services fit alongside a managed service as the on-site hands. Deploris provides field services: break-fix visits, hardware replacement and other on-site work. We are not a managed service provider and we do not replace one.
Many managed service providers have customers in cities where they have no engineers. They use a field partner to send a local engineer for the physical task, while they keep the customer relationship, the ticket and the monitoring. Organizations without a managed service also use field services directly for repairs. How a visit is requested, who approves it and what the report contains are agreed in a written scope. See the partner page for how that works with MSPs.
The verdict
If outages are costly and nobody in-house owns the environment, a managed service usually wins, because it adds monitoring and planning that break-fix does not. If your environment is small and stable, or you already have staff and only need hands for physical faults, break-fix is the better value. Many organizations end up with both, using a managed provider for the environment and a field partner for visits.