Long-term partnership

Stay engaged. On your terms.

After deployment, customers continue with BTA in two ways: Ongoing Advisory for periodic architecture reviews and change consulting, or Fully Managed Services where BTA operates the system day to day under your governance.

Talk to a specialistCompare the models
Two engagement options

Pick the model that fits.

Advisory is periodic guidance. Managed Services is continuous operations. Many customers run both, scoped to different parts of the environment.

Ongoing Advisory

Periodic engagement that keeps a senior BTA architect available to your team without committing to a full retainer or managed-services contract.

  • Quarterly architecture reviews tied to your business calendar
  • Change consulting for new use cases and platform expansions
  • Compliance reporting aligned to CMMC, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
  • Periodic training and team enablement as the environment evolves
Scope an Advisory engagement

Fully Managed Services

BTA operates the system day to day under your governance. Monitoring, change management, escalation paths, and SLAs owned end to end.

  • Monitoring and alert triage on a 24×7 model where required
  • Change management and policy lifecycle owned end to end
  • Defined SLAs, escalation paths, and runbooks under your governance
  • Continuous improvement reporting to executive stakeholders
Scope a Managed engagement
Compare

Advisory vs Managed Services.

A side-by-side view to help your team scope the right model.

Dimension
Advisory
Managed
  • Engagement model
    Periodic, retainer or block-of-hours
    Continuous, contracted operations
  • Day-2 ownership
    Your team owns operations; BTA on call
    BTA owns operations under your governance
  • Scope
    Architecture reviews, change consulting, training
    Monitoring, alerting, change, lifecycle, reporting
  • SLAs
    Response targets per retainer terms
    Operational SLAs by service tier
  • Best for
    Strong internal team that wants senior-level guidance
    Teams that want BTA running it day to day
Where this fits

Part of the broader BTA engagement model.

Advisory and Managed Services sit alongside the Full Service Lifecycle, Consulting, Deployment, Optimization, Enablement, and Mentoring engagement formats.

See all engagement models
Advisory & Managed · FAQ

Common questions about long-term engagement.

Direct answers to what most prospective clients want to know on a first call.

  • What is the difference between Advisory and Managed Services?

    Advisory is periodic. Your team owns operations and BTA stays available for architecture reviews, change consulting, and training as the environment evolves. Managed Services is continuous. BTA operates the system day to day under your governance with SLAs and runbooks.

  • Can we mix the two models?

    Yes. Many customers use Advisory for the corporate IT environment and Managed Services for a specific platform or business unit. The model can vary by region, business unit, or application group.

  • Do these models cover non-Cisco platforms?

    Yes. Both Advisory and Managed Services are vendor-aware. Cisco is the deepest area, but engagements regularly span Palo Alto, Fortinet, F5, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.

  • Is there a minimum commitment?

    Advisory is typically structured as 6 or 12-month engagements. Managed Services is contracted by service tier. Both are scoped during a 30-minute call, with terms confirmed before work begins.

  • How does this connect to the Full Service Lifecycle?

    The Full Service Lifecycle ends when your team can run the system on Day-2. Advisory or Managed Services is the optional next phase. You can pick neither, one, or move from one to the other as the business changes.
30 minutes

Schedule a call. We’ll scope it in 30 minutes.

Bring your hardest architecture problem. We’ll tell you what we’d do, what it costs, and how long it takes.

  • 30-minute scoping call
  • 1,000+ projects shipped
  • Training in every engagement

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