Services / Managed IT Services
Managed IT Services
Keep the lights on — without the ticket-system runaround.
Day-to-day IT support, 24/7 monitoring, and help desk for Houston businesses. Your people get a real person, fast, every time — plus a self-serve portal to open and track tickets anytime.
Context
Managed IT Services in Houston — what actually matters.
Managed IT in Houston has become a market of extremes. At one end, national chains and private-equity rollups run ticket systems out of out-of-state call centers, where the person answering has never seen your environment and won't be there next week. At the other end, one-person break-fix shops answer their own phone but can't staff the compliance, after-hours, and security work a modern business actually needs. Most Houston companies sit uncomfortably in between — paying for a managed-services contract that reads like an SLA but performs like a rotation of first-name-only techs reading from a runbook.
Mako Logics has run managed IT for Houston and The Woodlands-area businesses since 2001. Not a 2020 rollup of smaller shops, not a regional brand of a national franchise. The same engineering bench that picks up the phone today is the one that will pick it up on an engagement in year five. That continuity is the thing buyers under-value when shopping MSPs — and the first thing they miss when it's gone.
Behind the day-to-day support is a full-depth operations stack most one-person shops can't match: 24/7 proactive monitoring, patching, EDR and MXDR coverage, a client portal your people can open tickets in at any hour, a vendor-management layer so you're not on the phone with your ISP, and co-managed arrangements when you already have internal IT. All of it runs out of our offices inside the Westland Bunker — a Tier III data center we physically work inside of, not a facility we resell from a sales deck.
Managed IT is not glamorous. Done well, it is invisible. The point of this pillar is to make the technology part of your business quiet enough that your people can forget about it and get back to work. That is the outcome we sell. Everything below is how we produce it.
Who this is for
Houston-area businesses that want their IT to quietly work — without babysitting, without surprise invoices, and without a revolving door of call-center techs.
What’s included
The full picture.
| Service | What’s included | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Comprehensive IT Support | User support, workstation management, software and hardware troubleshooting, onboarding/offboarding | Your people can work without tech slowing them down |
| Proactive Monitoring & Maintenance | 24/7 system monitoring, patching, predictive maintenance, performance tracking | Problems get caught before they become outages |
| Help Desk | Real humans on the phone, escalation by a named senior tech, same-business-day SLA | You talk to someone who knows your setup, not a ticket router |
| Self-Serve Client Portal | Desk365 portal — open tickets, track status, view history, collaborate on updates 24/7 from any device | Your people don't have to wait until business hours to log an issue or get an update |
| Vendor Management | Single point of contact for ISP, software vendors, hardware resellers, SaaS providers | You stop being the middleman on every tech vendor call |
| Mobile Device Management | MDM enrollment, policy enforcement, remote wipe, app deployment | Phones and tablets get the same security posture as workstations |
| Co-Managed IT | Partnership with your internal IT team — we handle what they choose not to | You keep your in-house expertise and get depth on the hard stuff |
The details
What each piece actually looks like.
Comprehensive IT Support
Day-to-day IT that just works — from onboarding a new hire to fixing the printer that nobody else wants to touch.
Your people call. A real Mako tech answers. The ticket gets worked until it's closed. That's the whole model. We handle workstations, servers, printers, mobile devices, and whatever line-of-business apps your team depends on — from QuickBooks to your specialty vertical platform.
Full details →Proactive Monitoring & Maintenance
We catch problems before your team does — and fix them before they become downtime.
Every Mako-managed endpoint, server, and critical network device sits under 24/7 monitoring. Disk failing? We know before it fails. Patch that didn't apply? We catch it in the next cycle. Your environment drifts out of a known-good state? We bring it back.
Full details →Help Desk
You call. A real person answers. No bots, no tier-1 script, no callback promises that get forgotten.
The help desk is where most MSPs lose their clients. Ours is where we win ours. Your people reach a Mako tech who knows your setup, speaks plain English, and fixes the thing — or escalates it to a named senior engineer if it needs depth.
Full details →Co-Managed IT
You already have an IT person. We back them up — with the depth, after-hours coverage, and tooling a one-person shop can't carry alone.
Co-managed IT is for businesses that have an internal IT person (or a small internal team) and don't want to replace them. They want a partner that takes the work that's wearing them down — the 2 AM alerts, the security stack nobody on the inside has time to run, the projects that pile up while the day-to-day eats every hour. Mako runs co-managed engagements across Houston and the Woodlands area for healthcare practices, law firms, accounting firms, energy services, and construction businesses where the internal IT lead is great at the business-specific stuff but is being asked to also be the help desk, the security analyst, the vCIO, and the after-hours on-call. We split the work to suit. Sometimes Mako runs the security stack and the after-hours; sometimes Mako runs everything except the line-of-business app the internal person owns. The goal is to keep your internal expertise in place and stop burning that person out.
Full details →Our approach
How managed it services actually gets delivered.
- 1
Discovery — we learn your environment before we touch it
First two to four weeks of every engagement: a documented inventory of every endpoint, server, network device, line-of-business application, SaaS subscription, identity provider, and data flow. Not an automated scan dumped into a PDF — an actual walk-through with your people so we understand what matters, what's held together with tape, and what needs to be quietly replaced before it breaks. This is also when we find the shadow IT and the vendor contracts nobody renewed on purpose.
- 2
Stabilization — fix the known issues, then the hidden ones
The first 30-60 days close the biggest gaps: MFA on every account that touches business-critical data, backup coverage verified by actual restore tests (not just 'backups ran'), patching on a defensible cadence, and EDR on every endpoint. A client onboarded in this phase typically sees a measurable drop in open tickets within the first month — because the constant low-grade issues stop happening.
- 3
Operating rhythm — predictable, documented, accountable
Ongoing operations run on a documented service catalog with clear SLAs. Routine work follows a runbook your team can see. Every change is logged. Every ticket gets a named owner. Monthly you get a one-page report on what happened, what's coming, and what's being monitored. Quarterly, leadership and your vCIO sit down for a strategy review. If we ever get asked 'where are we on X,' we already have the answer in writing.
- 4
Continuous improvement — treat IT as something that compounds
The clients who've been with us a decade or more didn't stay because of the initial setup. They stayed because every year, their environment gets incrementally better — a vendor swapped for a better fit, a compliance gap closed before it became an audit finding, a new security control rolled out before the industry required it. That's the job long-term: not just keeping the lights on, but making the whole IT posture stronger every 12 months.
Related case study
Professional Services
Davis Investigation Services
FCRA-compliant infrastructure serving Fortune 500 and 100+ government clients.
Background check and investigative firm in Conroe, TX — built on strict FCRA, EEOC, and DOT compliance. Mako's job: keep the platform encrypted, audited, and always available.
How switching works
Four steps. No disruption.
The #1 reason businesses stay with a bad MSP is the fear of switching. Here’s how we make that fear unfounded.
01
Discovery
We learn your environment, your people, and your real pain points. No sales-team script — actual technical conversation.
02
Plan
We audit and deliver a written plan — what stays, what gets replaced, what gets hardened, what the monthly number looks like. No surprises.
03
Transition
We take over day-to-day without disrupting your work. Your current provider's runbook, your access, your vendor relationships — we document every piece before anything changes hands.
04
Running
Proactive support, 24/7 monitoring, quarterly strategy reviews. Your people call, a real person answers. Typically 2–4 weeks from signed agreement to fully operational.
Typical timeline from signed agreement to fully operational: 2–4 weeks. We document everything so if you ever leave, the next provider picks up without starting over.
FAQ
Managed IT Services — common questions.
What's actually included in a Managed IT agreement?
A monthly fixed fee covers unlimited support, monitoring, maintenance, help desk, and vendor management for the devices and users we manage. Hardware purchases, projects, and anything outside the scope are quoted separately so you always see what you're paying for.
How is Mako different from a big national MSP?
We don't use tier-1 call-center escalation routing. When you call, you reach a Mako tech who knows your environment. Our clients stay 10+ years on average — industry average is 3 to 5. The difference is mostly how we treat the day-to-day, not the service list.
Do you require a long contract?
Standard agreements are 1, 2, or 3 years with no mid-term exit. The reason is boring and honest: most of your monthly cost is vendor pass-through (EDR/MXDR, SIEM, backup, email security, M365, connectivity), and we sign term deals with those vendors to lock in pricing. The longer your commitment, the better the bulk rate we can pass through. We don't use multi-year terms as a retention gimmick, and there are no auto-renewing 5-year evergreen clauses buried in the fine print. Everything is in writing before you sign.
Can you work with our existing IT person?
Yes — that's Co-Managed IT. Your internal person stays in charge of what they know; we backstop them on the hard stuff (security, infrastructure, compliance, after-hours coverage).
How does onboarding work?
Four steps: Discovery, Plan, Transition, Running. Typically 2-4 weeks from signed agreement to fully operational. We document everything so if you ever switch away, the next provider can pick up without starting over.
Industries we do this for
Who relies on managed it services most
- Professional ServicesCompliance-heavy B2B firms — investigative, legal, insurance, CPA.
- HealthcareHIPAA-aware IT for mental health clinics, dental offices, and multi-location practices.
- CPAs & Accounting FirmsIRS Publication 4557 and WISP-compliant IT — built to survive tax season and cyber-insurance questionnaires.
Want to talk through managed it services?
Real person, real conversation, no pressure.