The IT environment that delivers for an Australian business 200 strong isn’t the same as the one that supports a headcount of 2,000. Most leaders know this. What’s less obvious is that the managed IT contract that worked for one stage often can’t keep up with the next.
The result is a situation many CIOs find themselves in. A monthly invoice from a managed services provider. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) dashboard showing compliance. And underneath it all, the nagging sense that they’re paying for management but receiving maintenance.
The two are different. Maintenance keeps the lights on. Management compounds value over time. Most Australian managed IT contracts are billing for the first and calling it the second.
How do you tell the difference? You measure it.
Brennan is one of Australia’s largest dedicated managed IT providers, working with enterprise and Government customers across financial services, healthcare, transport, utilities, not-for-profits, mining, and critical infrastructure.
We’ve measured customer satisfaction through Net Promoter Score (NPS) on every service interaction since 2016, generating more than 69,000 responses to date. The five-year transactional average is 80+, against an IT services industry benchmark of 55 (ClearlyRated, 2024).
Managed IT means hiring a specialist provider to run your technology environment for you. The provider takes responsibility for keeping it working day-to-day and improving it over time, under a contract that defines what good looks like.
The scope covers service desk, networking, cloud, infrastructure, end-user computing, integration with software vendors, and (in most modern contracts) baseline cybersecurity controls. A genuine end-to-end managed IT contract puts all of that under one accountable provider.
The shape of a good managed IT contract has changed since 2016. Managed IT today is a broader and more demanding category than it was when most current contracts were signed. Five forces have driven the shift.
Public cloud reached enterprise viability around 2014 and saw mass adoption from roughly 2018. By 2026, hybrid and cloud-first environments are the norm in Australian mid-market IT. Managed IT contracts written for a primary on-premise data centre estate are now operating against a different infrastructure reality, and most haven’t been rewritten to match.
AI tooling reset user expectations and integration complexity. Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Open AI, GitHub Copilot, and the agentic platforms following them have changed both how fast users expect IT to respond and the map of integrations IT now has to govern. Managed IT contracts written in 2018 weren’t built for this.
Security has shifted from a bolt-on to a baseline. The Essential Eight, APRA CPS 234, and the SOCI Act now reach into organisations that once only worried about firewalls and antivirus. Managed IT and managed security are increasingly the same conversation. Two recent additions to that conversation matter.
Managed IT in 2026 is a broader and more demanding category than it was when most current contracts were signed.
For organisations weighing their options, two distinctions matter.
A co-managed arrangement keeps an internal IT team in place and supplements it with provider capability. Full managed IT outsources the operational layer entirely, retaining strategy and governance inside the business. Brennan delivers both.
If your managed services partner isn’t delivering continuous, measurable improvement, they’re not delivering value: they’re just keeping the lights on.”
Brennan’s managed IT service delivery is underpinned by a named methodology: the True Performance System.
Developed over nearly 30 years across tens of thousands of customer interactions, the system is the operational answer to a question Dave Stevens, Brennan’s founder and Managing Director, asks bluntly.
The system runs on four feedback loops that operate continuously across every customer engagement.
The four loops feed each other. Customer feedback shapes practitioner priorities. Practitioner improvements show up in subsequent survey scores. The system compounds.
The surveys, analysis, and the customer-visible reporting all run through systems Brennan built for this purpose. Every customer has direct access to their own survey history through the Brennan customer portal: their transactional NPS scores over time, and the comments submitted after individual service interactions. Most providers keep this data internal. Brennan publishes it, including the critical scores.
The same feedback loop feeds The Foundry, Brennan’s AI-powered innovation engine that sits within the True Performance System, translating customer insight into new solutions and service improvements.
Two agreements govern how a managed IT service actually performs, and they are routinely conflated: the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the Operational Level Agreement (OLA).
Strong SLAs with weak OLAs miss targets quietly: the customer-facing number slips because an internal handoff did.
Both SLAs and OLAs cover standard expectations, but the binding agreement is unique to each organisation. Severity definitions, response targets, coverage hours, and escalation paths depend on the customer’s operational complexity and the level of risk both parties are prepared to accept. A template SLA is the starting point. The contract is built from there.
In practice, SLAs are also where customers find their previous provider was less accountable than the contract implied.
is the external commitment between the provider and the customer: the speed and quality of service the customer can hold the provider to.
is the internal commitment between the provider’s own teams (service desk, engineering, vendor management, security) that makes the SLA achievable.
The maximum time from incident logged to first technician engagement. For P1 incidents in a 24/7 environment, the target is measured in minutes, not hours. For Brennan, this can be as quick as 15 minutes.
Where the SLA tells the customer what to expect, the OLA tells the provider’s internal teams how they have to operate to deliver it. A mature managed IT practice publishes OLAs that mirror the SLA structure and close the gaps the SLA can’t see.
The OLA elements that matter most:
Brennan’s managed IT SLAs structure all six SLA elements, and the underlying OLAs are documented and reviewed on the same cadence.
Coverage tiers run from business-hours-only through to 24/7/365. Client visibility is continuous. Formal reporting is monthly, with a quarterly relationship survey layered on top. Severity definitions and OLA targets are calibrated to customer-specific business impact and risk appetite during onboarding, rather than imposed from a template.
An SLA tells you the provider hit their targets. NPS tells you whether your end users think the service is worth recommending. The two measurements answer different questions. Both matter, but only one is hard to fake.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most widely used measure of customer satisfaction in services industries globally. Customers answer one question: ‘How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?’ on a scale of 0 to 10. Promoters score 9 or 10. Detractors score 0 to 6. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, on a scale of minus 100 to plus 100.
Above 50 is considered excellent. Above 70 is considered world-class.
According to ClearlyRated’s annual NPS benchmark study, the IT services industry benchmark was 55 in 2024, up from a steady 42 across 2021 to 2023, and the highest figure ClearlyRated has recorded since 2011. The benchmark covers IT services providers globally, with Australian providers represented.
Brennan’s five-year transactional NPS average is 80+, calculated across more than 69,000 end user, individual interaction survey responses collated since 2016. It sits roughly 25 points above the global industry benchmark.
On any given interaction (a support ticket, a project completion, an onboarding milestone), the majority of our customers’ end users would recommend the service to a peer. The end users who wouldn’t trigger a review, a Quality team contact, and a documented improvement action published back to the customer.
A high NPS Means our customers’ end users are satisfied. They are receiving the support they need to quickly get back to their day in a productive way. We publish the NPS live so that both our teams and our customers can see, live, how we are performing. It’s an additional transparency layer that Brennan believes in strongly.”
The onboarding period is where a managed IT relationship is set up to succeed or fail. Most things that go wrong in year two were missed in the first 90 days.
The timings below are a standard baseline. Every engagement adjusts them. Change, whether from an incumbent provider to a new one or from in-house IT to managed, can be daunting and often carries risk. Some of it is visible at the outset, some of it is not.
The right onboarding timeline is the one set jointly with the customer once the risks and expectations on both sides are understood.
A managed IT onboarding should run in three phases.
The provider documents the current state: assets, applications, identity infrastructure, network topology, vendor relationships, ticket history, internal IT capability, and the user experience baseline. This is where the SLA tiers, support model, and escalation paths get calibrated to the actual business they cover.
Brennan runs transition in 4 stages: Initiation & Planning, Design, Develop & Deploy, and Finalisation. A dedicated Transition Manager owns the whole window.
Initiation & Planning sets the scope: Kick-off calls with both the customer and internal teams, a communication plan, and a deployment schedule agreed before anything moves.
Design locks the solution design with the customer's technical contacts and gets stakeholder sign-off on the deployment plan before build begins.
Develop & Deploy is where tooling goes live: service desk catch-over, monitoring agents, and the first incidents worked under the new contract. The outgoing provider stays on standby for anything outside the new team's containment scope during this period.
Finalisation closes the project formally: handover to the operations team, the project closure report, and a closure call with the customer.
The transition window is the highest-risk period in any managed IT engagement. Both sides need a named point of contact and a documented escalation path.
Continuous monitoring, patching, security hygiene, vendor coordination, and the start of the service-improvement program. NPS feedback starts from the first ticket: every resolved service interaction generates a survey, and the results feed the improvement program from day one.
Brennan’s onboarding methodology is part of the True Performance System: documented end-to-end, measured at every transition point.
Repeatable is what makes onboarding compounding rather than artisanal. The actual sequencing and cadence for any given customer are set once Brennan and the customer have jointly mapped the risks and expectations on both sides. The methodology is consistent; the timeline is scoped to the engagement.
Most organisations of any scale already have a managed IT provider. The more useful question is whether the provider matches your organisation’s stage, sector, risk profile, the maturity of your internal IT function, and whether the relationship is set up to compound or just to renew.
Six questions worth asking before the next contract renewal.
Can the provider show you their NPS, including the critical scores? Providers that publish this are operating under a fundamentally different accountability model.
Is the provider a systems integrator or a service desk? A genuine systems integrator brings depth across networking, cloud, security, end-user computing, AI, and application integration under one accountable contract. A service desk on its own handles tickets. A managed environment is everything around them.
Does the SLA reflect business impact or technical severity? P1 should mean ‘a meaningful number of users can’t do their jobs’. Some contracts code it as ‘a server is down’. Same incident, different categorisation, different response time.
Does the provider have sector experience that matters? Generic competence covers a lot, but health, financial services, not-for-profits, government, and critical infrastructure all carry sector-specific obligations a partner needs to understand.
Does the provider have longevity, referenceable experience, stable ownership and a strong growth trajectory? A managed IT relationship is a multi-year commitment, and the provider's own stability is part of the risk profile. Ask how long they have been operating, who backs them, and whether they can name long-tenure customers in your sector.
The engagement model is documented through the True Performance System and delivered by teams who have spent decades in the Australian IT landscape.
On the proven-and-stable test specifically:
Brennan has been operating in Australian IT since 1997, has grown strategically across that period, and in 2025 received a minority strategic investment from Macquarie Group, an external vote of confidence in the business and its trajectory.
Brennan delivers managed IT services for Australian organisations across financial services, healthcare, Not-for-Profit, transport, utilities, mining, government, and critical infrastructure. Customers include Northline (national logistics), Active Super (superannuation), and HammondCare (NFP / aged care), among many others.
Managed IT is the contracted, continuous operation of an organisation’s technology environment by an external provider. It covers service desk, monitoring, patching, security baseline, vendor coordination, project delivery, and ongoing service improvement against defined SLAs.
Break/fix is reactive. You call a vendor when something fails and pay for the time it takes to repair. There is little monitoring and no preventative work. Service quality doesn’t compound over time.
Managed IT typically produces fewer incidents, faster resolution when incidents do occur, and a clearer accountability line through agreed service levels and governance reporting.
An end-to-end managed IT service covers the planning, delivery, and operation of every layer of the technology environment under one accountable provider. The scope typically includes:
Brennan delivers all of the above under a single managed IT contract, with the True Performance System operating across the full scope.
Full managed IT typically suits organisations from around 100 users through to enterprise scale. Below 100 users and the cost of a full managed service often exceeds the value of a dedicated provider. A service desk plus targeted project support tends to fit better. Above 5,000 users, organisations sometimes split the scope across multiple providers or move to co-managed arrangements with a strong internal IT function.
Brennan works with Australian organisations where IT complexity, regulatory obligations, or multi-site environments make managed IT compound value. Customers span financial services, healthcare, transport, utilities, non-profits, mining, government, and critical infrastructure.
A managed IT SLA is the external commitment to the customer; an OLA is the internal commitment between the provider's own teams that makes the SLA achievable. A managed IT SLA should define severity tiers, response targets, resolution targets, coverage hours, escalation paths, and reporting cadence. The OLA should define inter-team handoff targets, vendor-dependency targets, and internal escalation triggers. Both cover standard expectations, but the binding agreement is unique to each organisation. It depends on the operational complexity and the level of risk both parties are prepared to accept.
Severity tiering drives the rest, and the severity definitions should reflect business impact (users unable to work) rather than technical severity (a server is down).
For a mid-market business, a typical structure runs four severity tiers (P1 to P4), with P1 response measured in minutes and P4 measured in days. Coverage runs from business-hours-only through to 24/7/365, depending on the operational profile of the business.
Brennan’s managed IT SLAs run all six structural elements, supported by documented OLAs reviewed on the same cadence, with severity and OLA targets calibrated to customer-specific business impact and risk appetite during onboarding.
A standard mid-market managed IT transition typically runs 8 to 12 weeks, with timings set jointly with the customer once the risks on both sides are mapped. Larger or complex environments take longer; smaller ones can move in 6 weeks.
The phasing is typically:
Brennan operates a documented transition methodology as part of the True Performance System, with a named transition manager on every engagement. The methodology is consistent; the sequencing and cadence for any given customer are scoped to the engagement once the risks on both sides are jointly mapped.
Transactional Net Promoter Score across the IT services industry globally averaged 55 in 2024, according to ClearlyRated’s annual benchmark study. The same study recorded 42 across 2021 to 2023, and the 2024 figure is the highest the study has recorded since 2011.
Above 50 is considered excellent in any services industry. Above 70 is considered world-class.
Brennan’s transactional NPS five-year average is 80+, calculated across more than 69,000 survey responses from end users after individual service interactions since 2016.
Source: ClearlyRated Annual IT Services NPS Benchmark Study (clearlyrated.com); Brennan internal data.
Co-managed IT keeps an internal IT team in place and supplements it with provider capability. Common splits give internal IT responsibility for strategy, architecture, and key vendor relationships, while the provider runs the operational layer (service desk, infrastructure operations, monitoring, security baseline).
Full managed IT outsources the entire operational layer. The organisation retains strategy, governance, and the in-house IT leadership role, but day-to-day operations sit with the provider.
Brennan delivers both. The right model depends on the size and maturity of the internal IT function, the strategic ambitions of the business, and the speed at which the organisation needs to move.
An MSP (managed services provider) runs the operational side of a customer’s IT environment under a contract. The scope can vary from service desk only through to end-to-end management of all infrastructure.
A systems integrator designs, builds, and delivers complete technology environments, integrating components from multiple vendors into a working whole. Systems integrators typically take on project delivery as well as ongoing management.
Brennan operates as both, with managed IT services delivered alongside project-based systems integration across networking, cloud, security, data and AI, modern workplace, and Microsoft Dynamics. One provider delivers the architecture and operates the result, which is often the more accountable model for mid-market customers.
Security is built into Brennan’s managed IT delivery, covering identity and access management, endpoint hardening, email security, network controls, vulnerability management, patching, monitoring, and incident response pathways.
The baseline is built against ISO 27001 (which Brennan holds across its own information security management practices) and reflects the controls described in the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight Maturity Model.
For customers with sector-specific compliance obligations (APRA CPS 234, the SOCI Act, the Information Security Manual, the Protective Security Policy Framework), Brennan’s broader cybersecurity practice delivers framework-specific uplift through a sovereign 24/7 Security Operations Centre and 300+ dedicated security specialists. The managed IT and cybersecurity services are designed to operate as one accountable engagement.
Yes. Brennan holds ISO 27001 certification, which covers the information security management practices used to deliver Brennan’s managed IT services and the supporting customer-facing systems.
