How we work
Every engagement runs the same way, whether it is a single-site clinic or a multi-site operator. You talk to the engineer who does the work. Nothing changes on your network until you have seen the plan. You get the same report every month. And you can leave with your documentation in hand. This page is the whole process, so there is nothing to discover later.
Updated 2026-10-02
The sequence
Typical calendar for a single site. Multi-site and regulated environments run the same steps over a longer window.
Day 0 · 30 minutes
You describe the environment and what hurts. We tell you whether we are the right fit, and if we are not, who might be. No slides. If it is a fit, we scope the assessment on the call and quote the fixed price.
About 2 weeks · $3,500 single small site, prepaid
Read-only review of firewall, switching, wireless, remote access, addressing and monitoring, plus a 7-day utilization capture and a walkthrough with whoever runs the office. We do not change anything during an assessment, with one exception: if there is no backup of your firewall configuration, we export one to encrypted storage and give you the key.
Day 10 to 12 · 60 minutes
You receive the written Network Health Report: inventory with vendor support dates, topology, ranked findings with severity and effort, and a 30/60/90-day roadmap with budget ranges. We walk through it with you. The report is yours whether or not you continue. Here is what one looks like.
Week 3 · your decision
If you want the work done, you get a fixed-price statement of work for the remediation items you pick, and a managed-service plan if you want ongoing coverage. Each is a separate decision. Many customers do the critical fixes with us and nothing else. That is fine.
Weeks 3 to 8 · scheduled with you
Fixes run in agreed change windows, usually evenings or weekends, each with a written change plan and a rollback. Monitoring is usually live within the first week after you hand over access. We stand it up with a secure remote-access connector and a private status dashboard for you at your own address on ambioedge.com. Credentials go into a vault, not a spreadsheet. You get a kickoff email, a dashboard walkthrough, and a 15-minute call if you want it.
Every month
Monitoring runs around the clock. You receive a monthly service summary on the first business day: uptime, incidents, changes made, trends, and what we recommend next. Silence between summaries means everything is fine. Within 14 days we ask for a second contact at your company so there is always someone we can reach. At six months we review whether the plan still fits.
Admin access to your firewall, switches and access points, or the name of whoever holds it. Your ISP account details and escalation contacts. Any existing network diagrams, however old. And the names of the people who can approve changes.
What arrives
Four monitoring plans and three ownership retainers are on the services page. This is how they differ in practice.
| Plan | Response to a critical issue | Included engineering | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edge Essential $695/site/mo · up to 10 devices | Next business day | None; standard changes at $225/hr, 30-minute minimum | Monthly summary |
| Edge Secure $1,295/site/mo · up to 20 devices | Same business day; acknowledged within 4 business hours | 1 hour/month standard changes | Monthly summary, quarterly posture check, config backup and change tracking, ISP escalation handled |
| Edge Compliance $1,795/site/mo · up to 30 devices | Priority same business day; acknowledged within 2 business hours | 2 hours/month standard changes | Adds firewall policy, VPN and access reviews, vulnerability tracking, log-retention guidance for auditors |
| Edge Multi-Site $2,495 first site + $995/additional site/mo | Highest priority, named escalation; acknowledged within 2 business hours | 3 hours/month standard changes, pooled across sites | Adds standardized configs across sites, quarterly roadmap review, performance tuning |
Standard changes are VLANs, DHCP, SSIDs, NAT and VPN users. Devices beyond a plan’s ceiling are $25 per device per month. Hours beyond the plan bill at the agreed rate or are scoped as a project. Response windows are business hours, Monday to Friday 8 AM to 6 PM Pacific. Outside business hours monitoring and alerts keep running; emergency work is $488 per hour, two-hour minimum, when an authorized contact asks. Response means acknowledgement, triage and start of mitigation. If we miss the business-hours acknowledgement target on a Critical issue, you can claim a credit of 10% of that site’s monthly fee on your next invoice. Contracted response times are defined in your agreement; the table is the plan design, not a guarantee of uptime.
The rules
Every change to production gets a written change record: what, why, when, how to roll back. Standard changes within your plan’s hours are scheduled in your maintenance window. Anything outside the plan or the statement of work needs your written OK from a named approver before we start. We never make an out-of-scope change because someone on site asked nicely.
Default window is Friday 6 PM to Sunday 6 PM Pacific, agreed at launch and changeable with notice. Emergency fixes outside the window happen when the alternative is an outage, and you hear about it the same day.
One number, one engineer. Severity is set when you report it and confirmed on first response: critical means a site or business-critical service is down. If we cannot reach you, we work the problem and keep the second contact informed. Vendor and ISP escalations are ours to run, not yours.
Assessments and project work are prepaid or deposit-backed. Managed plans bill monthly in advance by card or ACH through a customer portal; the first invoice is the only one you pay by hand, the rest run automatically. Fortinet hardware is quoted separately; other hardware at our cost plus 15%; hardware is never bundled into labor. Plan rates adjust by 4% at each anniversary. Standard changes for plan customers, beyond any hours the plan includes, bill at $225 an hour with a 30-minute minimum and 15-minute increments after that. Engineering outside a plan or statement of work bills by the hour at $225 to $350 depending on the kind of work, one-hour minimum, with after-hours and same-day emergency work at a 50% premium.
Configurations, credentials and documentation live in version-controlled storage and a credential vault under our control, not on a laptop. We hold independent administrative access to what we manage and you always hold your own. Suspected unauthorized access is reported to you within 24 hours.
The initial term is 12 months, but either side can walk away in the first 90 days with no fee (30 days’ notice; onboarding is non-refundable). If you leave after day 90 and before month 12, the fee is the lesser of three months of plan fees or what’s left in the term. After the first year, 60 days’ written notice. In-flight work finishes or stops at a documented point, your choice. Within 30 days you get your documentation, credentials, configuration backups and change history, diagrams, device inventory, alert rules and an export of the monitoring data, and we remove our access. No hostage credentials.
Fit
Organizations with 20 to a few hundred people, one to many sites, a network that matters to revenue or compliance, and nobody on staff whose main job is the network. Clinics, firms, manufacturers, multi-site operators, and IT teams that want a network specialist beside them rather than a generalist MSP over them.
Desktop support, printers, email, Microsoft 365 administration. We will tell you on the first call and point you to an MSP that does those well. If you need someone on site every day, we will say so and, where we can, bring a vetted field partner under our direction.
Step one
Bring the device count, the sites, and the thing that worries you. Leave knowing whether we fit and what the assessment would cover.
