There is a point in a tech company’s growth where infrastructure stops being background plumbing and starts consuming meaningful engineering attention.
Younger companies have the luxury of relatively few users and an engineering team small enough that someone usually knows what went wrong if a service fails. In other words, infrastructure remains one responsibility among many.
“If you are down, it means that your customers, your users, go to your competitor.”
Oleksandr Korzh, Dedicatted
Growth brings more users, heavier workloads, and far more dependencies. It’s also when maintaining round-the-clock coverage internally becomes cost-prohibitive and a recipe for burnout. For Oleksandr Korzh, Head of Managed Services at Dedicatted, this is usually the juncture when companies need to reconsider how they manage the systems underneath their products.
“The usual moment to start working with a managed service provider (MSP) is when infrastructure management becomes a significant part of your daily routine,” Korzh said. “When the load grows, when you become a target for malicious actors and there are scaling concerns, that’s the moment to consider a strategic partner who would take over infrastructure management and handle it for you.”
Dedicatted, a Toronto-based cloud, AI, and DevOps consultancy, provides managed support services for companies operating infrastructure across cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Its team takes responsibility for defined areas of its clients’ infrastructure and provides ongoing monitoring, incident response, cost optimization, security work, and technical support.
Its goal is to give growing companies a dedicated infrastructure function, so their own engineering teams can stay focused on the product.
Korzh said companies typically begin considering bringing on an MSP once they have a product in production and an established user base. It’s at that stage that platform reliability, security, and downtime carry real commercial consequences.
An outage affecting an early product with a handful of beta users may be inconvenient, but the same failure on a platform serving paying customers can send them looking elsewhere.
“If you are down, it means that your customers, your users, go to your competitor,” Korzh said. “And not only do they not buy something from you at that moment—they can also switch to your competitor, and stay with them.”
As companies scale, Korzh often sees infrastructure that has grown without a clear management strategy, where problems are handled as they arise, and weaknesses only become visible once something goes wrong.
One Dedicatted customer experienced a 10-hour outage on the first day the two companies worked together. According to Korzh, that single incident lasted longer than the customer’s downtime over the following year combined. Dedicatted traced the outage to a specific infrastructure bottleneck, resolved it, then introduced monitoring, runbooks, and other safeguards intended to catch similar problems sooner.
“We monitor infrastructure 24/7,” Korzh said. “We do not wait until the customer escalates an issue to us. The issue gets escalated automatically.”
Earlier detection is central to Dedicatted’s approach to managed services. Its team monitors infrastructure for anomalies, investigates incidents, and escalates problems through its top-tier engineering teams, when required.
Handing over responsibility for critical infrastructure also means giving an outside team access to systems a company may be reluctant to relinquish.
“Enterprises, especially the ones from very regulated industries, are very cautious regarding granting access,” Korzh added. “There is no way to persuade customers to trust us, other than by transparently showing that we are able to do the work and deliver the value they expect.”
Dedicatted begins each customer relationship with a tightly defined scope and limited permissions, then can take on more responsibility as each relationship develops.
“There is no way to persuade customers to trust us, other than by transparently showing that we are able to do the work and deliver the value they expect.”
Service-level agreements (SLAs) provide another layer of structure by establishing expectations around how Dedicatted will handle incidents. Support SLAs cover factors such as response time, resolution time, and how frequently the client receives updates during an incident. Availability SLAs set targets around metrics such as platform uptime. The same applies to architectural issues: the team escalates bottlenecks before user experience is impacted by infrastructure limitations.
Korzh explained that those kinds of commitments require a certain level of control over more than the underlying environment, since software deployments, or sometimes the customer’s own development team, can inadvertently take a service offline.
He said the need for managed support becomes more pronounced once a company has a real production environment and established user base. At that point, uptime, infrastructure expertise, and the ability to respond quickly to incidents become harder to treat as secondary concerns. He expects that pressure to increase.
“I think that [managed services] will be even more important because, with the [rise of] AI and with security threats, the environment becomes more and more aggressive,” Korzh said. “You need to learn. You need to adapt. You need to monitor what’s happening around you.”
For a startup without meaningful traffic, these concerns may sit down the priority list. But once customers depend on the platform every day, the calculation for companies will change.
“With us, they get not just a vendor who does some work they request,” Korzh said, “they get a partner who owns part of their operations.”
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Visit Dedicatted’s Managed Services page for more information on its incident management services.
Feature image courtesy Dedicatted