Production breaks at 3am. We own it.
Cloud managed services for AWS and Azure.
Somebody has to answer when production fails out of hours. In most small teams it is a developer who was hired to build the product. Critical Cloud takes that on: we run your AWS or Azure environment 24/7, own each incident until it is resolved, and fix the causes every month so the next one is less likely.
What are cloud managed services?
Cloud managed services means handing the day-to-day running of your cloud environment to a specialist provider. The provider monitors your infrastructure, responds to incidents, runs security operations and cost control, and improves the platform over time, under a contract that sets response times and who owns what. You keep ownership of your applications, your data and your business decisions.
A managed service is not a support contract. A support contract answers questions. A managed service provider does the work, holds the pager and is accountable when something breaks.
What a Critical Cloud managed service covers
The same foundation sits under every tier. The difference between tiers is coverage hours and how much improvement engineering you get each month.
24/7 incident management
Detection, triage, response, escalation and recovery, run by SREs rather than a ticket queue. Every SEV-1 ends with a blameless postmortem, and the findings go into the improvement backlog.
Monthly improvement engineering
Agreed hours every month across reliability, security, cost, performance, automation and governance. The monitors nobody trusts and the runbooks nobody wrote get fixed, not listed.
Datadog in your own account
We build and run your observability in Datadog, inside an account you own. Your team keeps full access at all times. Nothing sits in a proprietary layer of ours.
Security operations
Access reviews, threat detection and vulnerability management run through the monthly work. Security alerts get operational triage and containment. We are not a SOC and we do not do forensics.
Cost control
Rightsizing, waste removal, savings plan and reservation recommendations, and cost attribution, so each team can see what it spends and own it.
Runbooks, automation and evidence
Runbooks as code, infrastructure-as-code improvements and monthly reporting, all kept in your environment. We operate and evidence the runtime controls that support your compliance obligations.
Critical Response is incident cover only: it includes the incident management and Datadog foundation, without the monthly improvement engineering. ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certified.
One service, on AWS or Azure
Every tier runs on both clouds. The tooling changes between them. The commitments do not.
AWS managed services
Multi-account estates on AWS Organizations and Control Tower, workloads on EC2, ECS, EKS and Lambda, and GuardDuty and Security Hub findings triaged within contracted response times. Includes how our service differs from an AWS Support plan.
Azure managed services
Subscriptions organised under management groups and Azure Policy, workloads on AKS, App Service and Functions, and Defender for Cloud and Sentinel findings handled to the same response times. Includes taking over from another Azure provider.
Apps running on Vercel, Netlify and Supabase are covered too, on the platforms they already use: see production support for AI-built apps. We do not currently support GCP.
One team owns the incident, from the page to the postmortem
When an alert fires, an on-call SRE triages it, sets the severity and takes ownership. We work the incident through to resolution, not to the first chance to hand it back.
- 15-minute response to SEV-1 on every tier, within your coverage hours. This is contractual.
- Recovery times are targets, because recovery depends on the nature of the incident, not only on our speed.
- Escalation is ours to run: cloud provider tickets, vendor coordination and updates to your team.
- Agents own the analysis. Humans own the outcome. Datadog's Bits AI SRE and Watchdog assist triage, and an engineer approves every production, security and cost change.
- You keep control of IAM and admin access, access approvals and every material change.
- A blameless postmortem follows every SEV-1, and its actions go into the backlog.
We operate the stack. You own the product.
When a managed service beats hiring
A single hire does not make a rota. Nights, weekends and leave still need cover, and production does not wait for any of them.
Critical Support puts a team on the pager for around 75% less than building one, at the standard of an in-house 24/7 team. The capability also survives a resignation: runbooks, standards and history stay in your environment, not in one person's head.
Hiring is the better answer when you already staff a rota and want to keep it. In that case Critical Response covers the hours your team cannot, without replacing it.
Datadog is how we see your platform
Every environment we run is monitored and operated through Datadog: infrastructure, APM, logs, traces, security signals and cloud cost in one place, alongside CloudWatch or Azure Monitor. It lives in your account and your team sees what we see, so the record of every incident is yours as well.
Critical Cloud reduces mean time to resolve incidents by 40 to 60%. We are the world's first Powered by Datadog accredited MSP, and a Datadog Advanced Partner.
Three tiers of cloud managed service
All three run on AWS and Azure, use Datadog in your own account, and carry a contractual 15-minute response to SEV-1 incidents.
Critical Support
24×7 incident management + improvement engineering
The complete managed service. SRE-led incident response around the clock, plus monthly improvement engineering across six pillars: reliability, security, cost, performance, automation, and governance. Your platform becomes more resilient over time, not just kept online.
Critical Support Lite
Professional cloud cover for earlier-stage teams
The same SRE-driven, Datadog-native model as Critical Support, sized for single-cloud environments and start-ups. Out-of-hours incident protection and a monthly engineering allocation that scales with you, without the overhead of the full service.
Critical Response
Rapid detection. Clear escalation. Fast recovery.
Incident-response-only cover. No proactive engineering: just reliable, SRE-led detection, escalation, and recovery in the coverage window you choose. Right for teams with engineering capacity who need incident cover without a full managed service.
Choosing the right tier
If you're unsure which service fits, this is the short version.
The full managed service
Your platform is business-critical. Downtime has commercial or reputational consequences. You want someone to own operations and improve things, not just respond when they break.
Cover that fits your stage
You're a start-up or smaller team on a single cloud. You need professional incident cover and some improvement engineering, but the full service is more than you need right now.
Incident cover only
Your engineers handle the day-to-day. You just need someone reliable on-call when something breaks out of hours. No proactive engineering, just fast incident response.
Start with the evidence
If you cannot say which of these you need, that is usually a sign the environment has not been looked at properly in a while. A Cloud HealthScan assesses your AWS or Azure platform against the Well-Architected Frameworks and our own operational standards, read-only, and gives you a prioritised remediation plan to decide from.
Production cover for AI-built apps
Teams running AI-built apps on Vercel, Netlify and Supabase get the same monitoring and incident cover through Critical Support Lite or Critical Response. We run the production side. The product stays yours.
What this looks like on a real platform
OPX
A migration from Heroku to Azure, with Datadog integrated across Azure and Cloudflare for full-stack visibility. We took on 24×7 operations and the monthly improvement work; OPX kept building the product. The visibility held through the migration rather than being rebuilt after it.
Zero
A fintech's Azure platform, measured against Well-Architected through Azure Lighthouse. The output was a roadmap ranked by impact and effort, and Zero chose what to act on. That is how a Cloud HealthScan is meant to end.
Cloud managed services: common questions
What are cloud managed services?
Cloud managed services means handing the day-to-day running of your cloud environment to a specialist provider. The provider monitors your infrastructure, responds to incidents, runs security operations and cost control, and improves the platform over time, under a contract that sets response times and who owns what. You keep ownership of your applications, your data and your business decisions.
What does a cloud managed service provider do?
A cloud managed service provider watches your infrastructure around the clock, answers when something breaks and owns the incident until it is resolved. A good one also fixes the causes between incidents: noisy monitoring, missing runbooks, unreviewed access and cost nobody owns. At Critical Cloud that work runs on AWS and Azure, with a contractual 15-minute response to SEV-1 incidents on every tier, within your coverage hours.
How do managed cloud services compare with an in-house team?
One engineer cannot cover every hour of the year, so round-the-clock cover takes a team, not a hire. Critical Support puts that team on the pager for around 75% less than building one, at the standard of an in-house 24/7 team. If you already run a staffed rota you want to keep, Critical Response covers the hours it cannot, without replacing it.
Do you support AWS and Azure?
Yes. Every tier runs on AWS and Azure. Critical Support's Advanced plan covers both clouds together, and each Critical Support Lite plan covers one. Apps running on Vercel, Netlify and Supabase are covered too, on the platforms they already use. We do not currently support GCP.
Are you UK based?
Yes. Critical Cloud is headquartered in Cardiff, with offices in London and Dublin. Our SRE team and on-call function are based in Cardiff, and we offer UK data residency with log retention aligned to your policy.
Not sure which service fits?
Tell us about your environment: which cloud, how big, and who holds the pager today. We'll recommend the right tier.