Frequently Asked Questions

A Managed Service Provider (MSP) like IT is Commodity takes over the management and responsibility of your IT systems for a fixed monthly fee. Instead of reacting to problems after they happen, we proactively monitor and maintain your infrastructure to prevent issues from occurring in the first place.

The 40% savings come from several areas: eliminating costly emergency support calls, preventing downtime (which costs $5,000+/minute), optimizing software licensing, consolidating redundant tools, and right-sizing your hardware. Most businesses don't realize how much they overspend on the wrong things until we show them.

After your initial assessment, most clients are fully onboarded within 2–4 weeks. We begin with a thorough audit of your existing systems, develop a plan, and then methodically implement improvements — causing minimal disruption to your operations throughout.

Our headquarters are in Skokie, IL and we provide on-site support throughout the Chicagoland area. However, many of our services — monitoring, remote support, counseling, training, and education — are delivered remotely and are available to businesses nationwide.

We specialize in small and mid-size businesses — typically 5 to 250 employees. This is our sweet spot. We understand the unique constraints and pressures of smaller organizations and have tailored our service framework specifically for businesses of this scale.

We offer tiered service packages that let you start for almost free and add more as your needs grow. Pricing is typically per-user or per-device per month. We always begin with a free assessment to understand your environment before recommending a package — no pressure, no upselling.

We offer both month-to-month and annual contract options. Annual contracts come with better pricing. That said, we believe our results speak for themselves — our client retention rate is exceptionally high not because of contracts but because of the value we consistently deliver.

The free 15-minute assessment is a structured conversation where we evaluate your current IT situation, identify your biggest risks, and estimate potential savings. You'll leave with actionable insights regardless of whether you decide to work with us or not.

Absolutely. Many of our clients have in-house IT people or an IT manager, and we complement their work rather than replace it. We handle the monitoring, maintenance and documentation so your internal team can focus on strategic projects.

Security is built into everything we do. We implement multi-layered defenses including endpoint protection, email security, multi-factor authentication, security awareness training for your staff, patch management, and regular vulnerability assessments. We'll also help you meet any compliance requirements relevant to your industry.

Our monitoring tools detect most issues before they become outages. For critical systems, we offer 24/7 monitoring with emergency response. During business hours, we aim for a response within 15 minutes and resolution within 4 hours for most issues. We'll define SLAs clearly before we start.

Yes. We design and implement comprehensive backup strategies with offsite/cloud replication and test restores. In the event of a disaster — ransomware, hardware failure, or anything else — we can have most clients operational again within hours, not days.