What Managed IT & Private Cloud Cost in Southern California — the 2026 Guide

These are management rates, not rental or purchase prices. The hardware is yours: you own the firewall, the switches, the access points and the servers, and you hold any subscription that runs on them (firewall content filtering, IPS and VPN licensing, for example — see the licensing table above). If you need us to buy equipment for you, that is hardware at cost plus the published 6.5% procurement fee, quoted before anything is ordered. What the rates below buy is the monitoring, patching, configuration, vendor handling and support for each device.

Shared equipment is billed per device. A server at your premises carries the same rate as a person, because it takes comparable work to manage. A server we host carries exactly the same management rate — $125 on Core IT, $250 on Secure IT — because managing a server is the same job wherever it sits. What a hosted server adds is the hardware itself, on its own line.

We don't bill you per computer, per mailbox, or per switch. The per-user rate covers the person and the machine they work on, and every location gets a firewall, a network switch, a Wi‑Fi access point and a battery backup (UPS) managed at no extra charge. The rates above apply to the second switch, the fifth Wi‑Fi access point — the equipment a denser office genuinely needs. There is no fee for the address itself, and no separate line for having email.

Read the included capacity, not just the rate — it is where backup quotes are actually won and lost. Every figure below covers the licensing, the storage, and the management and restore testing around it. The storage is ours: your data sits on hardware we bought, in our Southern California facility, replicated to a second carrier-neutral facility far enough away to survive the same event. Every copy is immutable at every retention tier — ransomware cannot encrypt what it cannot modify — and immutability is not an upsell here, because in 2026 it should not be one anywhere.

Two retention choices, not four. We used to publish 30-day and 90-day tiers. We stopped: ransomware routinely sits in an environment longer than 30 days before it detonates, so a 30-day tier sells a cheaper product that fails in exactly the incident it exists for. One year is the standard. Seven years is for the retention obligations your regulator, not we, decided on. If you genuinely need something else, we will price it — we just will not put a trap on the menu.

How capacity is measured: we bill on the source data under protection, not the stored bytes — your bill reflects the data you have, not how we choose to store it. Capacity is averaged over 90 days and rounded up to the nearest 0.5 TB for servers or 250 GB for endpoints, so one month of temporary files never spikes an invoice. Immutable copies, offsite replication to our second facility, and documented recovery testing are included at both retention tiers.

And the fee nobody mentions until you need it. Restoring your data costs nothing here — no retrieval charge, no egress charge, no per-restore fee, however often you do it, including the test restores we run for you. That is not universal. Archive storage on a major public cloud bills data transfer out at $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB (their own published rate card, checked August 2026), so pulling back 500 GB is roughly $36 in transfer fees alone — every single time, which is also why some providers quietly test restores less often than they should. Our archive storage is $15 per TB with no retrieval and no egress fees, and it is on the rate card above.

Hosted virtual servers are priced by size on all-SSD infrastructure we own. These rates cover hosting only — server management is billed at the hosted-server rate above ($125 on Core IT, $250 on Secure IT), and backup at the retention rates above, so you can see exactly what each layer costs.

A hosted desktop environment needs servers behind it — a directory server, a secure access gateway, file storage, and the machines the desktop sessions actually run on. Each of those is sized on what actually drives it — which is not always headcount — and billed at the server rates below; none of it is folded into the per-user price. Quoting a per-user number and nothing else would be simpler to write and wrong on the invoice.

How we size that environment. Each server scales on the thing that actually drives it, which is not always headcount. Everything below is the standard build the calculator above uses; heavy applications change it, and discovery is where we find that out.

Worked example — 20 people. One directory server at $110. A gateway at $175. A file server at $250: $175 for the server, plus 1 billed terabyte of storage at $75, because 20 people at 50 GB is 1 TB, the server itself includes 500 GB, and the 500 GB left over bills as one whole terabyte — storage rounds up. One session host at $334: $310 for an 8 vCPU / 32 GB machine plus 4 GB at $6, giving it the 36 GB that 20 people need. That comes to $869 of hosted servers, before management and backup. The session host runs about two and a half people per processor core, which leaves headroom for the mornings when everyone opens everything at once. Every number here comes off the tables in this section — check the arithmetic rather than take our word for it.

You only pay for the connectivity you actually use. If your office reaches the hosted environment over a site-to-site VPN, everyone at that desk is covered by the one $25 site connection — nobody needs a personal VPN. The $5 remote-user VPN is for the people who work from home or on the road. Charging every seat for remote access when half your team never leaves the building would be easier to bill and harder to defend. A managed cloud firewall is included with Cloud Complete, because a hosted environment can't run without one.

Shared versus dedicated desktops: a shared desktop puts several of your own people on one session host — the server that runs the desktops, never another company’s — each person in a private, isolated session. It is the economical choice for standard office work. A dedicated desktop gives that person their own virtual desktop with reserved processor, memory and storage — the right call for heavy applications or where an environment must be isolated. Both run as virtual machines on our infrastructure; neither is dedicated physical hardware, which is what colocation is for. How our private cloud is built → Below roughly fifteen users a shared environment costs more to stand up than dedicated desktops, and we'll tell you that rather than sell you the wrong one.

Our SSD storage undercuts the major public clouds, which price comparable block storage at roughly $80–$150 per TB per month. Ours is $75, on flash we own. Archive storage carries no retrieval fees and no egress charges — cloud archive is cheap until you need the data back. Disaster recovery is not backup: backup restores your data, disaster recovery keeps a machine standing by to run it, with a 4-hour recovery target, a 15-minute recovery point and a documented failover test every year.

Why pay for redundancy when replication is already included? Because they protect against different things. Our platform replicates your environment nightly to a geographically separate facility we also operate, and that replication is standard on every hosted plan at no extra cost. It is a second copy of your data, not a point-in-time restore and not a standby machine — backup and warm-standby disaster recovery are separate services at published rates, both listed above. Multi-Cloud is availability: a second live copy of each server, replicating continuously, so a failed domain controller or an overloaded file server is absorbed instead of noticed. Multi-Region is the same thing with distance between the two copies. Smaller teams are usually well served by the included replication. Once enough people depend on a server that an afternoon without it costs real money, the 15% starts paying for itself. How the private cloud is built →

These sit above the security layer already included in Secure IT, for organizations that need documented security leadership or independent testing for an auditor, a regulator or a cyber insurer. To be clear about the boundary: ongoing vulnerability management and our internal posture assessments are included in your plan. The services below are different — a formal, point-in-time assessment or an independent penetration test, produced as evidence for a third party.

Why the bands are narrow, and why we split 51–150. A 51-person program and a 150-person program are not the same job — roughly three times the vendors, three times the evidence, three times the people to train — so charging both the same number meant one of them was always wrong. Two bands instead of one. These rates apply to new engagements. Existing clients keep the rate in their agreement, capped at the same 5% a year as every other line we bill, because a published cap that moves when it is inconvenient is not a cap.

We don't test our own work. Penetration testing is performed by an independent firm and coordinated by us, with remediation managed on your behalf. Testing a network we designed and built isn't a security assessment — it's a self-review, and auditors and insurers increasingly say so.

Compliance is an uplift on the plan rate, not a separate product — the work is documentation, evidence and audit support on top of the controls you already have. How we run a compliance program →

Compliance work is real, recurring labor — documentation, evidence collection, risk analysis, audit support — so it carries a defined uplift rather than being absorbed and quietly recovered elsewhere. The uplift applies to the per-user plan and per-server management only. Backup, private cloud resources, desktops and add-ons bill at the flat published rates above.

Published competitor and industry bands for compliance work run 15–30%. Every framework above is at or below that band.

Moving your data or your servers from one platform to another is a project, and every provider quotes it on a call. Here it is. Each rate below is published project labor at $165 an hour, in whole or half hours per unit — so you can check the arithmetic rather than take the number on trust.

Your onboarding is still $0. Discovery, documentation, the security baseline, agent and EDR deployment, identity and MFA, monitoring, backup enrolment and standing up your helpdesk cost nothing, however many people you bring across. A migration is different work — moving data or workloads between platforms — and it is priced above rather than absorbed quietly into a rate everyone else pays. If you take Cloud Complete, the server migration into our cloud is credited against your first twelve invoices — earned one twelfth at a time, with any unearned balance repayable if you leave inside the first year. Same investment, same intent as crediting paid discovery; it simply is not a free migration for someone who cancels in month three.

The line most people find out about late: PST files and third-party email archives. Every migration guide in the industry calls it the most underestimated cost of the project, which is exactly why it is on this table with a number next to it instead of appearing on an invoice afterwards. If you don't have them, you don't pay it.

Support is unlimited on every plan, so nothing below is a support charge. These are project work, deployments and the one-time items that come up when you join, grow or leave.

Our on-site radius is 175 miles from Newport Beach — and it's included. That reaches Los Angeles, San Diego, the Inland Empire, the Coachella Valley and most of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties without a travel charge. the one other Orange County provider publishing complete rates caps included on-site at 25 miles and bills $185 an hour beyond it, so check the radius before you compare hourly rates.

Removing a user is free, deliberately. We never want a price tag standing between you and telling us someone left the company — an account that outlives an employee is a security problem, not a billing opportunity.

Why a computer costs $350 to deploy and a phone costs nothing. It is a fair question, and there are three reasons rather than one.

The work is not comparable. A computer is procured, unboxed, built, imaged, encrypted, joined to your directory, loaded with your line-of-business software, has the person’s data and profile carried across from the machine they are retiring, gets tested, and is handed over with someone sitting beside them while they sign in. That is a couple of hours of hands-on work, and it is a project. Enrolling a phone is a link, a sign-in, and a policy that lands on the device by itself — usually done by the person holding it, in about the time it takes to read this page.

The phone is already priced. It carries a published monthly management rate on the rate card above, the same as any other managed device. A few minutes of enrollment sits comfortably inside that. Two hours of building a computer does not.

And the reason we would not trade away. A setup fee on a phone is a standing reason to leave one unenrolled — and an unmanaged phone reading company email is a security problem, not a billing opportunity. Charging $50 to enroll a phone would earn us a few hundred dollars a year and cost us visibility on the devices most likely to turn up in an incident report. Bring us every device you have, on day one or in year three, and we will secure it at no charge.

We do not hold a C-7 low-voltage license and we do not run cable. California requires that license for any cabling contract over $500, so structured cabling, jacks, conduit and physical security wiring are performed by a licensed C-7 contractor we work with.

The contractor invoices you directly for the cable. We invoice you for managing them. That split is deliberate and it is the honest version: California licenses low-voltage work, we are not licensed for it, and taking payment for work we cannot legally perform is exactly what that license exists to prevent. So you see their price, not our markup on their price.

We still stand in front of the whole thing. We select the contractor, write the specification and the acceptance criteria, run the schedule, inspect what gets installed and withhold sign-off until it meets spec. If it fails, managing the fix is ours. One company is accountable for the result — you simply are not paying us a margin on someone else's trade to get that.

The mechanics behind every rate on this page. Nobody publishes these, which is why they are the questions clients ask in the first month.

California sales tax, and what changes in January. Every rate on this page excludes sales tax. From 1 January 2027, California SB 122 extends sales and use tax to software and software accessed remotely — which will reach third-party licensing we pass through to you at vendor list. When it does, it will appear as its own line on your invoice and we will not mark it up, exactly as the licensing itself never is. We are telling you in August about a January change because you are building next year’s budget now, and because the guidance on how it applies in detail is still being written — when the state publishes it, this page changes the same day.