Your entire IT function — helpdesk, monitoring, patching, backup, security, licensing and vendor management — delivered by one UAE-licensed partner on a fixed monthly fee in AED. Remote-first because it is faster, on-site across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah because some things need hands.
Managed IT services means a provider takes ongoing responsibility for your IT environment for a fixed recurring fee, rather than billing you each time something breaks. A genuine managed contract includes continuous monitoring of servers, networks and endpoints; a helpdesk with defined response times; operating system and application patching; antivirus and endpoint protection; backup management and restore testing; firewall and network security management; Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration; licence and asset tracking; vendor liaison; and periodic reporting to management.
The distinction that matters commercially is proactive versus reactive. A break-fix or basic AMC arrangement pays a provider when things fail. A managed contract pays them to prevent failure, which aligns the incentive correctly. Nifty IT has delivered managed IT to UAE businesses since 2014, on fixed monthly AED pricing with the scope, exclusions and response times written into the contract.
Nine workstreams, all under one monthly fee. Every one of them is written into the contract so you can hold us to it.
Agents on servers, workstations, firewalls and network devices watching disk space, memory, service health, backup job status, certificate expiry and hardware warnings. Most of what we fix under a managed contract, you never hear about — which is the point.
One number, one email address, one ticket queue. Every request logged with an owner, priority and response target. Remote resolution first because it is faster, on-site when the problem is physical.
Windows, macOS, third-party applications, server operating systems and firmware kept current on a tested schedule rather than whenever someone remembers. Critical security patches are expedited outside the normal window.
Managed endpoint protection with a console we actually watch, email filtering against phishing and business email compromise, and multi-factor authentication enforced on every account that touches company data.
Veeam, NAKIVO or Synology backup jobs monitored daily, retention policies enforced, offsite or immutable copies verified — and scheduled restore tests with the results written down. A backup nobody has restored is a theory, not a backup.
FortiGate and equivalent firewalls kept on supported firmware, rules reviewed rather than accumulated, VPN tunnels monitored, guest and staff networks segmented, and switch and access-point health tracked.
User onboarding and offboarding, mailbox and SharePoint permissions, Teams governance, conditional access policies, and licence right-sizing at every renewal instead of renewing whatever was bought three years ago.
A live register of every device, warranty date, licence and renewal. We deal with Microsoft, your ISP, your hardware vendors and your software suppliers so your team stops losing afternoons on hold.
Ticket volumes, response performance, patch compliance, backup success rates and open risks, in a report you can hand to management — plus a quarterly session on what to budget for next.
Every plan is quoted after the free audit, because the honest price depends on the state of the environment we inherit as much as on headcount.
| Inclusion | Essential AMC | Managed IT | Managed IT Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | 5–25 users, one site | 25–100 users | 100+ users or multi-emirate |
| Remote helpdesk | Business hours | Business hours | Business hours + out-of-hours escalation |
| On-site visits | Scheduled monthly | Scheduled + reactive | Dedicated allocation |
| Monitoring & alerting | Servers only | Full estate, 24/7 | Full estate, 24/7 |
| Patch management | Included | Included | Included |
| Endpoint protection | Included | Included | Included |
| Backup management | Monitoring only | Managed + restore tests | Managed + DR testing |
| Firewall management | Quoted separately | Included | Included + security reporting |
| Microsoft 365 administration | User admin | Full tenant management | Full + conditional access |
| Asset & licence register | Included | Included | Included |
| Named account engineer | — | — | Included |
| Management reporting | On request | Quarterly | Monthly + roadmap |
| Pricing | Get Quote | Get Quote | Get Quote |
Plan names and inclusions are indicative and confirmed in your written proposal. All contracts are issued in AED by NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC, Dubai.
Nobody publishes a real number, so here is how the number is actually built — enough for you to sanity-check any quote you receive, including ours.
Why there is no price on this page: a per-user figure quoted before anyone has looked at your environment is a guess dressed as a number, and it is almost always revised upward once the first real problem surfaces. We audit first and quote from evidence. The audit is free and the report is yours whether or not you proceed.
Four ways a UAE business can resource IT. None of them is wrong for everyone — the honest question is which one your size and downtime cost justifies.
| Model | How you pay | Incentive | Best fit | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Break-fix | Per hour, per incident | Provider earns more when things break | Under 5 users, low IT dependency | No prevention, unpredictable cost, no accountability for uptime |
| Traditional AMC | Annual fee, asset-based | Reactive within covered assets | 5–25 users, stable environment | Covers equipment, not outcomes; security and backup often outside scope |
| Managed IT | Fixed monthly, per user or device | Provider earns more when things do not break | 25–250 users, real downtime cost | Higher monthly fee than AMC; needs a properly written scope to work |
| In-house IT | Salary, benefits, training | Fully aligned, full business context | 100+ users, or specialist compliance needs | One person cannot cover firewalls, cloud, backup and ERP, and has no leave cover |
| Co-managed | In-house salary + reduced monthly fee | Internal context plus specialist depth | 50–250 users with one or two internal IT staff | Needs clearly documented responsibility split or things fall between the two |
We deliver managed IT, AMC and co-managed arrangements, and we will tell you which one your business actually justifies — including when that answer is the cheaper one.
Triaging by business impact is what keeps the critical queue fast. These are indicative targets; your contract carries the committed figures.
| Severity | Example | Target response | Escalation |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 — Critical | Site down, server failure, ransomware, no internet company-wide | Immediate during business hours | Out-of-hours on Managed IT Plus |
| P2 — High | Department affected, email flow down, shared application unavailable | Same business day | Engineer assigned on first contact |
| P3 — Medium | Single user cannot work, printer down, access issue | Next business day | Escalates if impact widens |
| P4 — Low | New user setup, software request, how-to question | Scheduled | Batched into planned work |
| Planned project | Migration, office move, hardware refresh | By agreed project plan | Quoted separately from the managed fee |
An engineer reviews your network, servers, endpoints, licences, backups and security posture, on-site or remotely. You receive a written report of every risk found, ranked by urgency, with what each would cost to close. No charge and no obligation — and the report is useful even if you appoint somebody else.
Inclusions, exclusions, response targets, on-site allocation and a fixed monthly figure, all in writing. You can start with one service line and add others later; nothing requires moving everything at once.
We collect credentials and licence ownership from your outgoing provider or internal team, document the environment properly — IP schemes, topology, licences, backup jobs, warranty dates — and give that documentation to you. Where a previous provider is uncooperative we have rebuilt access from scratch before; it costs time a clean handover does not.
Monitoring agents, endpoint protection, patch policies and backup verification go on first, because they are what stop the next incident. The critical risks from the audit are closed in this phase or scheduled with dates.
Your team gets one number and one email address for support, with a short briefing on how to log a ticket. Reviews run quarterly with a report you can hand to management, covering ticket trends, patch compliance, backup success and the open risk list.
Head office in Deira with same-day on-site response under managed contracts across Business Bay, DIFC, Al Quoz, Jebel Ali, Dubai Silicon Oasis, DMCC, Deira and Bur Dubai — mainland and free-zone.
Scheduled on-site coverage for Mussafah, KIZAD, Al Reem, Yas Island and the city centre, with identical remote helpdesk, monitoring and escalation to Dubai clients.
Sharjah industrial and free-zone businesses, plus Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah on a scheduled visit model with full remote cover between visits.
Managed IT services means an external provider takes ongoing responsibility for your IT environment for a fixed recurring fee, instead of charging each time something breaks. A full managed contract covers continuous monitoring, a helpdesk with defined response times, patching, endpoint and email security, backup management with restore testing, firewall and network management, Microsoft 365 administration, licence and asset tracking, vendor liaison and management reporting. The commercial logic is that the provider is paid to prevent incidents rather than to attend them.
Managed IT in the UAE is priced per user or per device per month, and the figure is driven by four things: how many users and devices are in scope, how healthy the environment is today, how much sits inside the fee versus billed on top, and what response commitment you buy. A twenty-user office on current hardware with clean licensing costs materially less to support than the same office running an unsupported server and expired antivirus. Any provider quoting a per-user price before seeing your environment is guessing. Ask every provider for a written exclusions list alongside the monthly number — that is where quotes actually differ.
An annual maintenance contract is traditionally reactive and asset-based: you pay a yearly fee and the provider repairs covered equipment when it fails. Managed IT is proactive and user-based: the provider monitors continuously, patches and hardens the environment, manages backup and security, and is measured on preventing incidents. Most UAE SMEs start on an AMC and move to managed IT when downtime begins costing more than the difference in fee. Nifty offers both and will tell you which your size and risk profile justifies.
For most companies under about 100 users, yes — but the honest comparison is not salary versus monthly fee. A single IT hire covers roughly business hours minus annual leave and sick days, and one person cannot realistically be strong at firewalls, virtualisation, Microsoft 365, backup design and ERP simultaneously. A managed contract buys a team with those specialisms plus monitoring tooling and vendor escalation. Above 100 users the usual answer is co-managed: keep the internal hire for business context and buy specialist depth and holiday cover alongside.
Yes, and it is how most of our clients start. The transition begins with a documented audit of what is installed, licensed, patched and backed up, and what is currently failing. We then request a clean handover of credentials and licence ownership. Where an outgoing provider is uncooperative we have rebuilt administrative access from scratch before, but it costs time that a professional handover does not. We would rather overlap by a fortnight than have you leave anyone mid-crisis.
Hardware and software purchases, project work such as migrations, office relocations and hardware refreshes, structured cabling, and bespoke development sit outside the monthly fee and are quoted separately before they start. Third-party licences and subscriptions — Microsoft 365, backup software, endpoint protection — are itemised so you can see what is service and what is licence. Everything excluded is listed explicitly in your contract rather than left to interpretation, which is the single most useful thing to check in any provider's proposal.
Monitoring runs 24/7 on all Managed IT and Managed IT Plus contracts, so alerts are generated and many issues are resolved automatically outside working hours. Human helpdesk response is business hours as standard, with out-of-hours escalation for P1 incidents included on Managed IT Plus and available as an add-on elsewhere. We would rather sell you the cover your downtime cost justifies than the most expensive tier available.
Twelve months is standard, which reflects the real onboarding investment on both sides. Monthly rolling and 24-month terms are available, priced accordingly. There is no penalty clause designed to trap you: your environment documentation is handed over on request at any point in the term, because a contract that depends on you being unable to leave is not a contract we want to be in.
Yes. Mixed Windows and macOS environments are common in UAE design, media and professional-services firms. Monitoring, patching, endpoint protection and backup all cover both, and Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are managed identically across platforms. Tell us your split at audit stage so device management is scoped correctly rather than retrofitted.
Two to three weeks from signature for a typical single-site SME: audit and proposal in week one, credential handover and documentation in week two, monitoring, backup and security deployment plus go-live in week three. Multi-site or multi-emirate environments take longer, mainly because of site visits and ISP coordination. If you are in an active crisis we can stabilise first and complete the formal onboarding afterwards.
That depends on your data type and sector. UAE e-invoicing rules require electronic invoice data to be retained inside the country, and healthcare, financial and government-adjacent sectors carry their own residency and retention obligations. We treat hosting region as a compliance decision rather than a technical preference, and we confirm the region of every cloud tenant and backup target during the audit. For anything with legal exposure, confirm your position with a qualified adviser — we design to the requirement you confirm.
You give notice per the contract, and we hand over documentation, credentials, licence ownership and monitoring configuration to you or your incoming provider. We do not hold licences in our own name where they should be in yours, and the environment documentation we produce is yours throughout the term, not something released as a bargaining chip. Ask every provider you are considering this question before signing — the answer tells you a great deal.
An engineer reviews your network, servers, backups, licences and security posture and sends you a written report ranked by risk. Free, no obligation, and yours to keep whether or not you become a client.
NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC · Burj Nahar Mall, M2 Floor, Office D2-4, Deira, Dubai · 04 355 1136 · [email protected]