Access — how it works
Advice and judgement, not ownership and operation.
Panacea Access gives you retained access to senior judgement — advice, technical review, qualification and guidance — so you can make better decisions faster. It sits between our two other services, and it's designed to be genuinely useful without quietly turning into hands-on delivery or 24/7 support. This page explains, in plain English, what that means in practice: what you get, what stays with you or your suppliers, and how we handle the grey areas honestly rather than letting them drift.
Where Access fits
It helps to see Access alongside our other two services. They aren't tiers of the same thing — they answer different questions.
Scoped projects with a clear outcome and end date.
Ongoing access to senior advice, review and second opinions.
Managed support, monitoring and hands-on operational cover.
Who Access is for
Access works best when you have someone — an internal team, a managed service partner, or a capable individual — who can act on advice. We help you decide what to do, challenge what's being proposed, and quality-check the direction of travel. Someone on your side still needs to carry the work out or make sure it happens.
Typical users are leaders and technical owners who don't want to make big calls in isolation: choosing suppliers, sizing up a proposal, deciding whether a plan is sensible, working through risk and roadmap questions, or getting a considered second opinion before committing money or effort.
What you get, and what isn't included
Access is deliberately advisory. Here's the honest line so there are no surprises later.
- • Senior technical review of plans, designs and proposals
- • Architecture, vendor and platform guidance
- • Second opinions on quotes, SOWs and roadmaps
- • Qualification and challenge of supplier or partner proposals
- • Risk, security and roadmap conversations
- • Pre- and post-incident guidance and lessons-learned reviews
- • Guidance during an incident (advice, not resolution)
- • Scheduled review sessions and async questions within agreed response windows
- • Incident ownership or resolution
- • Monitoring, alerting or 24/7 response
- • Out-of-hours or weekend cover
- • Hands-on change implementation or configuration work
- • Project delivery, build or migration work
- • Managing your third parties or suppliers on your behalf
- • Unlimited ad-hoc requests or always-on Teams / chat cover
- • Formal service governance, SLAs or on-call rotas
- • Acting as your IT department
If something you need sits on the "not included" side, we'll say so and point you to Consult (to deliver it) or Care (to run it) — whichever is the right fit.
How it works in practice
How you engage us
You get scheduled review sessions plus async questions by email or a shared channel that we agree at the start. We respond within an agreed response window during UK business hours. There is no 24/7 hotline, no on-call rota, and no expectation of instant replies out of hours. For anything time-critical, we'll be honest about realistic turnaround so you can plan around it.
Response vs resolution
Access is measured by how quickly we respond with advice, not by how quickly something is resolved. Resolution — the actual fix, change or rollout — stays with your team, your suppliers, or with Care if you have it. We'll help you think it through, ask the right questions, and sanity-check the plan; we won't take the keyboard.
During an incident
When something goes wrong, Access is there to help you think clearly: triage what's happening, ask the right questions of the people fixing it, review your comms, and help you make calls under pressure. What Access won't do is take operational ownership of the incident, drive the fix, or become a substitute for a proper support arrangement — that's what Care exists for.
Third parties and suppliers
We'll happily help you evaluate, challenge and qualify your suppliers — reviewing proposals, pushing back on scope, and helping you ask the questions they'd rather you didn't. What Access doesn't include is managing those suppliers for you, sitting in their governance meetings on your behalf, or being the point of contact they route work through. That relationship stays yours.
Change and implementation work
Advising on a change is Access. Performing the change is Consult or Care. When a conversation starts to cross that line — "can you just make this change", "can you configure that for us" — we'll flag it, explain why, and offer a small Consult scope or a Care conversation instead of quietly absorbing the work.
Projects and delivery
Access is not a delivery vehicle. Anything with a defined outcome, a deadline, or a deliverable you need us to produce belongs in Consult, where it can be properly scoped, resourced and priced. We'd rather agree that up front than let a project drift into an advisory retainer that isn't sized for it.
Tooling, access and credentials
We generally work from the information you share with us in sessions and documents. As part of Access we don't take standing admin credentials, hold keys to your production systems, or take ownership of your ticket queues. If a piece of work genuinely needs that level of access, it belongs in Consult or Care and we'll set it up properly.
Confidentiality and your information
Anything you share with us stays confidential and is only used to help you. We won't name you as a client or share your details without permission, and we handle your information with the same care we'd want for our own business.
Fair use
Access is priced for advisory load, not operational load. In practice that means it comfortably covers regular reviews, considered questions, and second opinions when you need them. What it isn't priced for is repeated hands-on requests, always-on chat expectations, or effectively becoming your IT team by another name. If usage starts to look like that, we'll have an open conversation and move the right work into Consult or Care rather than let it stretch quietly.
When something is really Consult or Care
Some requests genuinely need delivery hands or operational cover rather than advice. When that happens we'll say so early, explain why, and offer a Consult scope or a Care conversation. If you're already a Care client, the handover is straightforward; if not, we'll help you decide whether it's worth setting one up or handling it a different way.
Annual vs monthly plans
A twelve-month commitment with a fixed price for the year. Best value, and gives us both a stable rhythm of reviews and planning. Cancellable at the end of the term with notice.
Rolling month-to-month with more flexibility. Priced slightly higher to reflect the shorter commitment, and cancellable with notice at any point.
Both plans include the same scope of advisory support — the only differences are commitment length, price, and cancellation terms.
Term, renewal and changes
We won't make surprise changes to price or scope in the middle of a term. If we need to adjust anything at renewal, we'll give you fair notice in advance so you can decide whether to continue, change plan, or wind down.
Ending an engagement
If you decide Access isn't the right fit any more, we'll wind things down in an orderly way. Any notes, recommendations and decisions you've received from us are yours to keep and use. There's no lock-in on your own data or information, and we won't hold anything back to make leaving awkward.
Not sure if something is in scope? Just ask. We'll tell you honestly, and if it's really a Consult or Care job we'll say so and help you decide the best way to handle it. The whole point of Access is that you get straight answers from someone senior — including on whether Access itself is the right service for what you need.