Compliance & Sovereignty
AI Act, NIS2, DORA, CRA and GDPR readiness, with EU-resident hosting we operate ourselves.
Explore the pillar →Managed IT services means a partner runs your infrastructure, cloud and security for a predictable monthly fee. In Europe in 2026 it also means proving compliance: only 16% of organisations in scope consider themselves NIS2-ready, and partners, investors and customers have started asking for the evidence. Argus Root runs the operations and produces that evidence inside the EU, as the engineers on the tools rather than a dashboard reselling someone else's platform.
In short
- The model is now standard: the managed-services market is around $380–460 billion in 2026, and 76% of SMEs already rely on an MSP for at least some functions.
- Security is the growth engine — managed security is the fastest-growing segment at roughly 17.8% CAGR — and managed compliance for regimes like NIS2 is the fastest-growing new category of all.
- It is mostly co-managed now: 83% of providers offer a co-managed model that augments your internal team rather than replacing it, so you keep control where you want it.
- The economics are predictable: fully managed runs about $150–175 per user per month and co-managed $50–100, against $100k+ a year for a single senior in-house hire — and it turns CapEx into OpEx.
- In Europe the differentiator is the evidence: with only 16% NIS2-ready, the value is an operator who both runs the systems and produces the audit trail, inside the EU.
Services · Managed
Managed IT services, run by the people on the tools.
In Europe, managed services have become a compliance function as much as an operational one. We run your infrastructure, cloud and security inside the EU, with NIS2, DORA and the AI Act built into how it operates rather than bolted on after a review.
◆ EU-resident ◆ Security built in ◆ NIS2 / DORA aware
Managed services became a governance function.
Europe's managed services market is on track for roughly €67 billion in 2026, and managed security is its fastest-growing part as NIS2 and DORA force continuous monitoring and incident response. The shift underneath the numbers is what matters: a managed partner now sits inside your compliance posture, alongside the uptime figure.
When a regulator or a customer's procurement team asks who runs your systems and where the data sits, the answer is part of your risk profile. More than four in ten European organisations report being asked to prove NIS2 readiness by a partner. A managed provider that cannot answer for its own infrastructure becomes your liability rather than your cover.
The pressure is real and largely unmet. Across UK and EU organisations bound by NIS2, only about 16% consider themselves fully compliant more than a year past the deadline, while three quarters now treat compliance as a competitive advantage worth paying for. The directive also names ICT managed service providers as regulated entities in their own right, with senior management personally accountable, so the question is no longer only whether your provider can keep you compliant but whether the provider is compliant itself. A partner that is in scope and can show it strengthens your position; one that has not yet grasped that it is regulated weakens it.
What do we manage?
One operator across the stack, so an incident does not bounce between vendors before anyone owns it.
Managed hosting
AlmaLinux and cPanel servers, hardened and patched, with uptime and performance we answer for. Explore →
Server management
Linux administration wherever your servers run: patched on time and documented for NIS2, hardened to a CIS baseline. Explore →
Managed cloud
Hybrid and EU-resident cloud: scaling and cost control without surrendering data residency. Explore →
Cloud migration
The right move chosen per workload, landed on EU infrastructure, with zero-downtime cutover and the tested exit DORA expects. Explore →
Cloud cost optimization
FinOps that removes waste, rightsizes what's left and turns spend into unit economics, with the honesty to say when to leave the cloud. Explore →
Managed security & SOC
Wazuh HIDS, continuous monitoring, geo-blocking and incident response, mapped to NIS2 measures. Explore →
Vulnerability & patch management
The whole estate scanned, the few CVEs that can reach you ranked by real risk, fixed and logged for NIS2. Explore →
DevSecOps & supply chain security
SBOM, SLSA provenance and Sigstore signing built into your pipeline — the chain of trust the EU Cyber Resilience Act now requires by law. Explore →
Penetration testing & offensive security
Human-led testing that proves your controls hold, with audit-ready evidence mapped to DORA, NIS2, PCI DSS and ISO 27001 — continuous PTaaS, EU testers. Explore →
Managed DevOps & platform engineering
CI/CD, GitOps, managed Kubernetes, infrastructure as code and observability built into one internal developer platform — and operated for you in the EU. Explore →
NOC 24/7 — network operations
A managed Network Operations Center watching your infrastructure around the clock, resolving incidents to ITIL before they become outages — white-label for MSPs, EU-run. Explore →
Microsoft 365 migration
Move to or from Microsoft 365 without breaking your mail — SPF/DKIM/DMARC and MX cutover handled by email specialists, with EU data residency. Explore →
IT service desk & technical support
L1–L3 support to ITIL practice that resolves at first contact — incident and problem management, white-label for MSPs, EU-run. Explore →
Managed databases
MariaDB and PostgreSQL operations: tuning, replication, tested backups and patch discipline. Explore →
Monitoring & NOC
Networks, servers and AI agents watched from one place, with alerting tuned to your baseline. Explore →
Backup & disaster recovery
Recovery targets translated into a real plan, with in-region copies and restores that get tested on a schedule. Explore →
Virtualization & VMware exit
Off Broadcom and onto a sovereign open-source stack — Proxmox or KVM — that we migrate and run for you inside the EU, with no new lock-in. Explore →
By industry
The same services, bundled for the regulatory regime a sector actually answers to.
Healthcare
NIS2, GDPR, EHDS and the AI Act on one estate, with clinical AI on open-weight models on your own hardware — so the data never leaves the EU. Explore →
Financial services & fintech
A DORA-ready ICT provider: Article 30 clauses, Register-of-Information data, audit rights and a tested exit strategy as standard — plus the resilience testing and incident support DORA expects. Explore →
Public sector & government
Sovereign by default: off Microsoft and VMware onto an EU-operated open stack, data under EU jurisdiction and control, security mapped to NIS2. Explore →
Legal & professional services
Confidential by design: privileged client data kept under EU control and out of external processors, ransomware defence, and the security evidence clients and insurers demand. Explore →
What does "managed" mean here?
Managed means very different things depending on who is selling it. At one end it is a help desk and a ticketing portal sitting in front of someone else's cloud; at the other it is an operator running the infrastructure end to end and answering for how it behaves. We are the second kind. The servers, the network, the security and the email infrastructure are ours to run inside the EU, which is why we can answer a regulator's question about where data sits and who can reach it rather than pass it up to a vendor above us.
It also means one service rather than a sprawl of them. A typical estate accumulates a hosting company, a separate security vendor, a backup tool, a monitoring product and a cloud bill, each with its own contract and its own gap at the seams where they meet. We cover those areas as a single operation, so an incident does not bounce between suppliers and the evidence for an audit comes from one place. The shift clients ask for in 2026 is from "can you fix this" to "can you prevent it and show the business value", and that is far easier to deliver when one operator holds the whole picture rather than coordinating five.
Built on three pillars.
Every managed engagement draws on the areas where operating from inside the EU changes what we can offer.
Email Infrastructure
PowerMTA, dedicated IPs and authentication that meet the 2026 Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft rules.
Explore the pillar →Observability & AI
Network, server and AI-agent monitoring from one place, plus sovereign LLM hosting in the EU.
Explore the pillar →Fully managed, or co-managed?
Not every team wants to hand over everything, and none should have to. Fully managed means we run a service end to end and you stop thinking about it. Co-managed means we take the layers you would rather offload, the patching, the security monitoring, the out-of-hours response, while your own people keep the parts they do best. We scope the split to where your team's time is worth most, and move the line as that changes rather than locking it in a contract.
Either way the commercial model is a predictable monthly agreement rather than the lumpy capital spending and emergency call-outs of break-fix. You trade an unpredictable cost that spikes when something fails for a flat operating expense that includes the work to stop it failing. Against the two alternatives most teams weigh, the difference looks like this.
| Break-fix | In-house team | Managed with us | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | Unpredictable spikes | Fixed headcount | Flat monthly |
| Cover | When it breaks | Office hours, one team | Continuous |
| Compliance evidence | None | If you build it | Produced as standard |
| Data residency | The vendor's choice | Yours to run | EU, operated by us |
| Who answers at 3am | No one | On-call, if staffed | Us |
How an engagement begins.
We start with a review rather than a quote. Before pricing anything we look at what you run, how it is hosted, where the data sits and which rules reach you, and from that we map what is worth taking off your plate and what is fine where it is. The output is a scoped proposal that names the services, the split between fully managed and co-managed, and the monthly figure, rather than a package priced before anyone has seen your stack.
Where you already have a provider, we plan the handover so it does not become an outage. Access is transferred, the setup is documented as we take it on, and anything that was undocumented or half-finished is brought up to a standard rather than inherited and left. The aim is that the move is felt as less to worry about, not as a risky switch, and that the evidence trail an auditor wants starts accumulating from the first month rather than the first review.
We run the metal, not a dashboard.
Many managed offers resell a hyperscaler tenancy and put a ticketing portal in front of it. When something breaks, the people answering your ticket are reading the same dashboard you are. We operate the servers, the network and the security ourselves, inside the EU, so the person fixing your incident is the person who built the setup.
We operate AlmaLinux cPanel Wazuh HIDS PowerMTA nftables In-region backups
Questions buyers ask.
What does managed IT include?
A managed provider runs the parts of your IT you would rather not staff for: servers and hosting, cloud, databases, security monitoring, backups and recovery, under a predictable monthly agreement. We cover those areas as one service rather than splitting them across vendors.
How do managed services help with NIS2 and DORA?
Both require continuous monitoring, incident response, access control and third-party oversight. We implement those measures and keep the evidence current, so when a partner or regulator asks you to prove readiness, the record already exists. DORA in particular pulls your ICT providers into scope, so the provider you choose matters.
Is my data kept in the EU?
Yes. We host and operate inside the European Union, with no foreign parent in the chain that a non-EU government could compel. For workloads where in-region data is a hard requirement, that is the starting point rather than an upgrade.
What is the difference between managed and co-managed?
Fully managed means we run the service end to end. Co-managed means we work alongside your team, covering the layers you want to hand off while you keep the rest. We scope the split to where your team's time is best spent.
Do you resell cloud or run your own infrastructure?
We operate our own servers, network and security, and we run EU-resident cloud where it fits. When a public cloud is the right call, we manage it with the same discipline, but the core of what we offer is infrastructure we control rather than a tenancy we resell.
How is pricing structured?
As a predictable monthly agreement scoped to what we run for you, so IT moves from unpredictable capital costs to a flat operating expense. We size it to your stack after the review rather than quoting a package blind.
Is my managed provider itself regulated under NIS2?
Often, yes. NIS2 names ICT managed service providers as regulated entities, and a provider above the size thresholds operating in or serving the EU is an important entity with binding obligations and personal management accountability. It means the provider you choose should be able to show its own compliance as well as help with yours, because under DORA and NIS2 its posture flows into your supply-chain assessment.
Can you take over an environment another provider set up?
Yes. We review what exists, transfer access, document the setup as we take it on, and bring anything undocumented or half-finished up to a standard rather than inherit it as-is. The handover is planned so it is felt as one less thing to worry about rather than a risky switch with a gap in cover.
What size of organisation do you work with?
Mostly SMEs and mid-market companies, often the ones now caught by NIS2's size thresholds or selling into regulated buyers who ask them to prove readiness. We scope the engagement to the estate rather than a tier, so a small team with a serious compliance need and a larger one consolidating vendors are both a fit.
How quickly do you respond to an incident?
Cover is continuous rather than office-hours, and response times are set in the agreement to match how critical each service is, so a production outage and a minor request are not treated the same. Because we operate the infrastructure ourselves, the person responding is one who knows the setup rather than a first line reading from a script.
What do you not cover?
We run infrastructure, cloud, security, databases, backup and email rather than end-user help desk for laptops and office software, and we are the operator rather than your law firm, so legal interpretation of a regulation stays with counsel. Where a need sits outside what we do well, we say so rather than stretch to cover it badly, which keeps the engagement honest about where our value really lies.
Managed services review
Tell us what you run. We'll tell you what we'd take off your plate.
Send us your stack and the frameworks your customers keep citing. We map what we would operate, what stays with your team, and where the compliance gaps sit, before you commit to anything.
Operated within the European Union Security and compliance built in One named operator, answerable