Helpdesk staffed now · Engineers on call in Allegheny County
Failsafe IT runs the helpdesk, patching, backups and security for 34 small Pittsburgh companies — 6 to 90 people each. Critical tickets get a live engineer in 15 minutes, day or night. On-site in the city inside 90 minutes.
Strip District client · after-hours switch cutover
Triage · what to do in the next five minutes
Three calls make up most of our after-hours volume. Do the step, then call (412) 555-0165 — the person who answers is an engineer, not an answering service.
Case 01 · Encryption
Pull the network cable or turn off wifi on that machine only. Do not reboot it and do not delete the note — both destroy evidence your cyber carrier will ask for.
Then call. Containment starts on the phone.Case 02 · Wire fraud
Call your bank's fraud line first — recalls inside 24 hours sometimes land. Then change the mailbox password and revoke active sessions.
We pull the mailbox audit log and forwarding rules.Case 03 · Hardware down
Check that the UPS is not simply beeping on a dead battery — that is the cause about a third of the time in old mill and rowhouse basements.
On-site inside 90 minutes, city limits.Every Failsafe IT agreement publishes the clock. Tickets land in our PSA with a priority stamp, page a named on-call engineer, and escalate to a Level 3 automatically if nobody has touched it. You get the timestamps in your quarterly review — including the ones we missed.
Six things we actually do
No "unlimited support" with unwritten exclusions. Here is the scope, the tooling behind it, and what it costs when it sits outside the monthly seat.
01
Live first-line during business hours, on-call engineer overnight. RMM agents watch disk, backup jobs, patch state and 71 alert conditions on every endpoint — we usually call you before you notice.
Included in every seat
02
EDR on every endpoint, DNS filtering at the edge, and image-based backups built 3-2-1-1-0 with an immutable copy off-site. We run a real test restore every quarter and send you the screenshot — an untested backup is a rumour.
Security tier · +$38/user
03
We take ownership of the tenant properly — global admin in your name, licenses under CSP, MFA enforced with conditional access, SPF/DKIM/DMARC actually passing. Onboarding and offboarding done in one ticket.
Included · licenses billed at cost + 8%
04
Predictive and on-site surveys for brick, steel deck and freight shafts — the reason wifi dies in the back half of a Strip District warehouse every afternoon. Cat6A structured cabling, managed switching, VLANs, documented port maps.
Project · $2,400–$18,000
05
Annual Security Rule risk analysis, written policies your auditor will accept, encryption and access evidence collected continuously. We also fill in cyber-insurance renewal questionnaires and CMMC/NIST 800-171 prime-contractor forms with you on a call.
Retainer · from $650/month
06
Two stocked vehicles with spare switches, firewalls, laptops and UPS batteries. Duquesne Light blips, a flooded basement closet, a dead hypervisor — somebody is walking through your door, not screen-sharing from three states away.
Included for contract clients
Case file · March 2024
"We called at 4:52. Someone answered on the second ring and told me exactly which cable to pull. They were in our Green Tree office before six. Monday morning everyone logged in like nothing happened — we lost about forty minutes of work, not four days. The previous IT company had never once tested the backup they were billing us for."
— Managing partner, 22 seats, client since 2021Weeks 1–4
Most of our clients came from a one-person shop that stopped answering, or a national provider that never showed up. The handover is four steps and you keep working through all of them.
We inventory every endpoint, circuit, license and admin credential — and get them all into your name. If the old guy has your 365 global admin, we fix that first.
MFA enforced, EDR deployed, backups rebuilt and restore-tested, local admin rights stripped. Written remediation list with what we did and what needs budget.
Your team gets one number, one email and a 20-minute walkthrough. Ticket volume typically spikes for two weeks, then drops about 40% by month three.
A vCIO session with a three-year hardware and license budget by month, plus your SLA hit-rate. First 90 days carry an out-clause — if we are wrong for you, leave.
Per user, per month · 12–36 month terms
Three tiers, priced per seat, invoiced monthly with a true-up. Microsoft licenses are billed separately and shown on the same invoice at cost plus 8%.
$95per user / month
Best for 25–90 seats with one IT hire
$165per user / month · most clients
Best for 10–60 seats with no internal IT
$245per user / month
Best for medical, legal and defense suppliers
One-time onboarding and remediation: $95 per endpoint, quoted flat after the assessment. Project work outside contract runs $155/hour, $210 after hours. A 40-person firm on Fully Managed lands around $6,600 a month before licenses. There are no coupons in managed IT — the free thing we offer is a network and security assessment with a written findings document you keep either way.
Coverage · Allegheny, Butler, Washington, Beaver, Westmoreland
Both vehicles start the day inside city limits. If your office is between the Golden Triangle and Monroeville, an engineer is standing in it within two hours of a P1 — with a spare switch, a loaner laptop and a fresh UPS battery in the back.
Duquesne Light serves roughly 627,000 customers across Allegheny and Beaver counties, and the $200M+ Watson Substation work Downtown means planned load transfers with real outage risk. We check UPS runtime and generator transfer on every site visit, because a remote-only provider cannot walk into your basement closet at 7am.
Credentials over slogans
There is no state license for computer consulting in PA — which is exactly why so many "IT guys" disappear. Ask any provider for these five things before you sign anything.
Modern Work and Security designations. Registered with the PA Department of State; City of Pittsburgh business registration current. Security lead holds CISSP; engineers carry CompTIA Security+ and Network+.
PA workers' comp and commercial auto in force. Certificate of insurance, additional-insured endorsement and W-9 emailed within one business day of request — no sales call attached.
Nine verified client interviews, 94% contract retention over eleven years, 412 endpoints and 38 servers under management. We will hand you three current clients your size to call directly.
Straight answers
No. There is a documented tenant-recovery path with Microsoft using proof of domain ownership. We have run it nine times. Budget three to ten business days and expect to prove you own the domain via DNS. Once it clears, admin lives in your name and we hold delegated access only.
Our smallest client is six seats. Below about eight people the math usually favours a security-only bundle — EDR, backup, M365 hardening, no full helpdesk — at $74 a seat. We will tell you if that is the honest answer for you.
Yes, and we do it on a screen-share so you understand each answer before it is submitted. Most Pittsburgh carriers now require MFA on email and remote access, EDR on endpoints, and tested off-site backups. We can have all three in place inside two weeks if your renewal is close.
Hardware, Microsoft and third-party licenses, cabling and construction, ISP circuits, moves and new-office buildouts, data recovery from failed media, and work caused by someone refusing our documented security baseline. Everything else — tickets, patching, monitoring, backups, on-site emergencies — is inside the seat.
A named on-call engineer, rotating weekly, carries the phone. Median answer time on overnight P1 calls last quarter was 3 minutes 40 seconds. Ask for the report at your review — we publish the misses too.
Terms are 12, 24 or 36 months with an annual escalator, but the first 90 days carry an unconditional out-clause. Cancel inside that window and you keep every piece of documentation we built, plus your credentials. We would rather lose a bad fit in month two than fight about it in month twenty.
24/7/365 · Pittsburgh and the four surrounding counties
One ring, an engineer, a 15-minute clock. If you are not a client yet, we will still tell you what to unplug before we talk about money.
(412) 555-0165Not urgent? Email help@failsafeit.example for the free assessment
Tell us about your project and we'll reply within one business day.
Prefer to talk? Call (412) 555-0165