Focus on your business - we’ll take care of the workstations
Every minute a computer is not working is a minute of lost productivity. Xion IT Group’s Desktop IT Management service handles the monitoring, maintenance and security of your systems, so your team can work without interruptions and without having to “make do” with technical issues.
Through the XION MSP platform, we provide small, medium-sized and large businesses - as well as offices and professional practices - with enterprise-grade technical support at a competitive fixed fee.
What we do for you, every day
- Help desk with remote support: a technician connects to the workstation and resolves the issue within minutes, without delays.
- Continuous monitoring of all devices: servers, PCs and peripherals are watched proactively; many issues are resolved before you even notice them.
- Multichannel support: phone, email and web, with a dedicated consultant who knows your business.
- Patch management: system and security updates applied regularly, so vulnerabilities are closed before they can be exploited.
- Operational security: scheduled antivirus scans and regular security checks.
- Preventive maintenance: disk health monitoring, performance optimisation and energy-saving policies.
- On-site interventions across Italy whenever a technician’s physical presence is required.
Why it makes sense
An in-house IT department costs money; neglected IT costs even more. With Desktop IT Management, you get the best of both worlds: specialist expertise always available, predictable costs and intervention times guaranteed by contractual SLAs. The result is less downtime, higher productivity and IT costs that are finally under control.
What the service includes, in detail
When we take over the management of your workstations, the first week is dedicated to the inventory: every PC, server, printer and licence is entered into a live asset register, updated automatically by the XION MSP platform. From that point on:
- every device reports its health status (disks, memory, temperature, missing updates), and anomalies generate a ticket before the user notices;
- security updates are approved, tested and rolled out according to an agreed policy — never uncontrolled updates that bring your ERP system to a halt on Monday morning;
- interventions are documented and indexed: your company’s IT history remains recorded and accessible, even if you decide to change provider one day;
- a regular report, written in clear language, explains what has been done, what has been prevented and what we recommend planning next.
What it really means to “manage” a workstation
It is a generic term that covers very different kinds of work, and this is where the real difference between one provider and another almost always lies.
Knowing it exists. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t: the first thing we do is create an inventory, meaning a list of every device, who uses it, what runs on it, when it was purchased and when it should be replaced. In most companies, that list does not exist, and the consequences show up everywhere — computers nobody updates because nobody knows they exist, licences still being paid for former employees, replacements made in a panic instead of being budgeted.
Keeping it up to date without interrupting work. Updates are applied by groups and within agreed maintenance windows, not all at once and not in the middle of the morning. And they are verified: an update that has been installed but not restarted is not installed.
Seeing the problem before it breaks. A disk starting to show errors, storage space running low, temperature rising: these are warning signs that appear days before a failure, and someone has to be reading them.
Getting it back up quickly. When a workstation really does fail, recovery time depends on how standardised it was beforehand. With a documented configuration, it can be replaced within an hour; without one, the whole day is spent rebuilding it.
When someone joins or leaves
This is the moment when you see whether workstations are truly managed or simply repaired, and it is also the point at which the most lasting risks arise.
When someone joins, you need a ready-to-use computer with the software required for that role, a user account with the right permissions — not administrator rights for convenience — access to the folders they need and no others, and email configured. Done properly, it is an hour’s work. Done from scratch every time, it takes a full day.
When someone leaves, you need a procedure that most companies simply do not have: revoke user accounts, recover the device, secure any files stored only there, and remove access to email and external services. In assessments, we almost always find active credentials belonging to people who left months earlier. It is not negligence: without a clear list of who has access to what, there is nothing from which to remove a name.
Workstations outside the office
Remote and mobile working have made normal what ten years ago was exceptional: company computers spending days away from the corporate network. That changes three things.
Updates still need to be delivered, even when a laptop does not return to the office for weeks. Disk encryption becomes genuinely important, because a lost laptop without encryption is a data breach that may need to be reported. And access to internal resources must be handled in a controlled way, with multi-factor authentication, rather than by opening a route to the public internet.
We cover this in more detail on the smart working page.
The lifecycle, and why planning pays off
A business computer has a reasonable useful life of four or five years. Beyond that point, the cost does not disappear: it shifts, becoming lost time — slow start-ups, more frequent failures, incompatibility with newer software, and growing risk because older systems stop receiving security updates.
The advantage of a managed fleet is that replacements can be planned in stages rather than all being forced at once: you know which machines reach end of life this year and which will do so next year, so the cost can be spread over time. Without an inventory, companies discover they need to replace fifteen machines in the same quarter, and almost always at the worst possible moment. For businesses that prefer to turn investment into a steady operating cost, there is also the option of long-term rental.
A practical example
A professional practice with 25 workstations typically calls us 3 to 4 times a month for critical issues before the service is activated. After three months under XION MSP management, calls usually drop to fewer than one a month: the problems have not disappeared — they are detected and resolved by monitoring before they can disrupt work. The average remote support response time is just a few minutes; the user clicks, and the technician is already connected.
Getting started
- Free site visit — a consultant assesses your device fleet, critical issues and working practices;
- Fixed-fee proposal — sized according to the number of workstations and service level, with no hidden costs;
- Onboarding — installation of monitoring agents and asset discovery, without disrupting anyone’s work;
- Business as usual — helpdesk, preventive maintenance and regular reporting.
Cancellation is not tied to hidden multi-year renewals: we retain clients through service quality, not contractual clauses.
The cloud side
Today, a large part of workstation management lives within Microsoft 365: licences, mailboxes, permissions and migrations have a dedicated page, Microsoft 365 support for businesses.