The unmanaged computer, a short horror story
An unmanaged computer is a mystery box. Nobody knows if it's patched, whether the disk is about to die, or what got installed on it last month. It works fine right up until the Tuesday it doesn't, and then the whole office finds out at once. The cost of that Tuesday, in lost work and emergency callout, is usually more than a year of proper management for the same machine.
Monitoring and RMM: the quiet caretaker
RMM stands for remote monitoring and management, and it's the unglamorous half of device care. An agent on each computer reports health (disk, memory, temperatures, failing hardware), applies Windows and application patches on schedule, and lets us fix problems remotely without hovering over anyone's shoulder. Most of the value is invisible: the crash that never happened because the failing disk got swapped a week early, the exploit that bounced off a patch applied last month. On the Otterly menu this is $59 per device per month including unlimited remote helpdesk, and it's part of our minimum standard, so every machine we touch gets it. Anything that needs hands physically at your desk is billed separately at our standard on-site rate, and we tell you before we come.
EDR: the guard dog that watches behaviour
Traditional antivirus works like a bouncer with a photo album: it blocks threats it recognises. Modern attacks don't pose for the photo. EDR (endpoint detection and response) instead watches how every machine behaves: a Word document spawning PowerShell, a login at 3am from nowhere, files suddenly encrypting themselves. When something looks wrong, the device can be isolated from the network in seconds, before one infected laptop becomes forty.
The catch is that EDR generates alerts, and alerts need humans. That's why ours comes with a security operations centre reviewing them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, not just during Brisbane business hours, because ransomware crews are famously bad at respecting timezones. This is $30 per device per month, and we made it part of the minimum standard rather than an optional upgrade, because good security shouldn't be a paid extra.
Servers: same idea, higher stakes
A laptop failing ruins one person's day. A server failing ruins everyone's, because servers hold the shared files, the line-of-business app, the thing the whole office quietly depends on. So servers get both halves at once: around-the-clock monitoring, and cloud backup to fall back on when the worst happens. Want your backups proven, not just taken? Restore testing is available as a separate service.
On the menu that's two line items: server management at $199 per server per month, and cloud backup at $150 per server per month with 500GB of storage included. Both are minimum standard: there is no cheaper Otterly tier where the server goes unwatched or unbacked, because a server without backup isn't managed, it's gambling. Exact pricing varies by machine, since physical servers and virtual cloud servers are different animals, so each server is confirmed in your proposal.
The short version
Managed means: patched before exploits land, watched before hardware fails, guarded around the clock by EDR and real analysts, and backed up to the cloud. Put your machine counts into the calculator and the whole picture prices itself in two minutes.