// the managed desk
The Gold Standard desk
The part most platforms sell as professional services and we run as product: named analysts, recorded presence, and an availability figure with money behind it.
// the problem
Software does not stay up at 3am
Every compliance platform sells you a place to put your security programme. Almost none of them will run it. The gap between owning a tool and having a security function is where most programmes quietly fail.
The part most vendors sell as professional services, we run as product. Named analysts, recorded presence, and an availability figure with money behind it.
// the people
Tiered analysts, and what a tier actually gates
Analysts are tiered L1 through L3. The tier gates authority, not visibility — which is a narrower claim than most vendors make and a more useful one.
- Tier
Gates escalation and reassignment. An analyst may reassign work they own, or work owned by an analyst at their tier or below.
It does not gate what they can see. Tier is about authority over work, not access to it.
- One analyst, everywhere
An analyst is a single global identity across every client whose signals they work, not a separate per-client account.
Working your signals never makes an analyst a member of your company.
- Shift
A span of duty an analyst opens and ends. It is the only record that they were available to the desk, and it covers every managed client at once.
Not a schedule. A schedule says who is expected; a shift says who is present.
- Presence
Live evidence that an on-duty analyst is still at the desk. Presence that lapses ends the shift and releases their claimed work back to the desk.
So a lapse costs an analyst their work, not merely their status. Availability cannot be asserted by someone who has gone home.
// the surface
A console that spans every client at once
Our analysts work from a cross-client console rather than logging into your tenant. That is a deliberate design, and it has consequences you benefit from.
- Work reaches an analyst only when they are on duty. Anything reaching nobody is recorded as a coverage gap rather than queued — see the full lifecycle
- When an analyst does need to act inside your workspace, a real member record is created for them first, so every action has an auditable subject. Nobody operates as a shared admin account.
- In a managed engagement the desk is ours and your CISO retains read-only oversight of everything we do. You are never locked out of your own security operations.
- The same queue and the same actions are reachable programmatically, so the console is a surface rather than a screen.
// the assurance
Availability that costs us something
This is the part that separates a managed service from a support promise. Availability is a contractual figure, and it backs service credits.
- It measures how much of the month the desk was reachable, excluding declared maintenance windows.
- It drops only on positive evidence — a gap in the engine's heartbeat, or a piece of work that provably reached nobody. It never drops on merely missing records, because that would let bookkeeping masquerade as an outage.
- A maintenance window is an accounting exclusion and nothing more. It suppresses no signals, pauses no clocks, and changes nothing about how work is routed or when it breaches.
- Because credits are attached, this is a commercial number rather than an operational dashboard metric. It is calculated to be argued over.
The specific availability percentage and the credit schedule are set in your service agreement. Ask us for the current figures on a call — we would rather quote them to you directly than publish a number here that drifts out of date.
// the shape of it
Run it yourself, or have us run it
The platform is the same either way. What changes is who is holding the pager.
- Self-managed — you run the platform and your own desk, triaged by your own staff through the employee portal. See how the tiers compare
- Managed — our desk runs your security operations, with a dedicated CISO available and your own CISO retaining oversight.
- The escalation path out of a managed engagement is a real product feature, not a renegotiation. Nothing about the managed tier makes your data or your programme harder to take back.
// questions this answers
How the managed service works, answered directly
What does the managed tier actually include?
Tiered analysts working your signals from a cross-client console on recorded shifts, a dedicated CISO, and a contractual availability figure that backs service credits. Your own CISO retains read-only oversight of everything the desk does.
Do your analysts get access to my whole tenant?
Analysts work from a cross-client console rather than logging into your workspace. When one does need to act inside it, a real member record is created for them first, so every action has an auditable subject and nobody operates as a shared admin account.
What does the availability figure actually measure?
How much of the month the desk was reachable, excluding declared maintenance windows. It drops only on positive evidence — a gap in the engine's heartbeat, or work that provably reached nobody — never on merely missing records. The specific percentage and credit schedule are set in your service agreement.
Can I move from managed back to running it myself?
Yes. The platform is identical either way; what changes is who is holding the pager. Nothing about the managed tier makes your data or your programme harder to take back.
// keep reading
Where this goes deeper
Want to see this one live?
Book 30 minutes and we will walk through “The Gold Standard desk” in the actual platform, using your environment as the example.