Home / How Engagements Work

How an engagement actually works.

Three models, one classification system, and a first month you can hold us to.

We do not publish prices, because honest pricing follows scope and no two casino floors have the same scope. Everything else is published here: the three shapes an engagement can take, how we classify priority, and what the first thirty days look like.

Three Models

Every engagement is one of three shapes.

We have engineered casino IT, security, and surveillance since 2011, for tribal Class II and Class III properties and commercial casinos. The work has always reduced to one of these three. If yours does not fit, we will say so in the briefing rather than force it.

Managed services agreement

Ongoing work on a monthly cadence: managed IT, 24/7 help desk, cybersecurity and compliance upkeep, and Aristocrat Oasis 360 support. The scope is agreed in writing before work starts: what we run, what you run, and where the line sits, on paper before anything breaks.

Fixed-scope assessment

Deliverable-defined work: the report is the product. A full-stack security assessment, a surveillance system review, a compliance gap analysis against PCI-DSS, NIST, or your gaming regulator's requirements. Scoping happens in the briefing, so both sides know exactly what the report will cover before work begins. When it is delivered, the engagement is done. No trailing retainer unless you ask for one.

Pilot

How our products enter a property, modeled on the OptiFloor pattern at two sister-property pilot casinos in Colorado: bounded scope, running on your hardware inside your perimeter, and measured against your own history rather than a vendor benchmark. You keep the findings either way. A pilot that does not earn the next step still leaves you knowing more about your own floor.

Priorities

How we classify priority.

Every managed services agreement starts from this classification model. To be clear up front: this table is how we classify, not a quoted SLA. Response targets are set in each agreement, in writing, sized to your property and gaming schedule. We will not publish a response-time number a contract has not backed.

P1Gaming operations are impaired. Example: a surveillance recording gap or a player tracking outage on a gaming day. All hands until resolved.
P2A function is down but the floor operates. Example: a single pit terminal down. Worked urgently, without pulling people off a P1.
P3Degraded but operating. Slow systems, a failed redundant component, an error that has a workaround. Scheduled promptly and tracked to closure.
P4Scheduled work. Patching, upgrades, moves and changes, documentation. Planned with you, around your calendar.

The examples are deliberate. A generic severity matrix does not know that a recording gap on a gaming day is a different kind of emergency than a slow file server. Ours does. We have been on casino floors since 2011.

Onboarding

The first 30 days.

For a new managed services property, the first month runs the same sequence every time.

  • 1. Kickoff and vendor paperwork. Named accounts under your control, access at the narrowest level the work needs, and the vendor and regulatory paperwork your property requires, started on day one because it is usually the slowest part.
  • 2. Documentation capture. We inventory what is actually there: network, systems, vendor contracts, and the undocumented things every property accumulates. The documentation is yours.
  • 3. Monitoring live. Monitoring comes up on your premises, watching the systems in scope, so we are finding problems instead of hearing about them.
  • 4. First review. At the end of the month we sit down with what we found, what we fixed, what we recommend, and anything in the agreed scope that turned out to be wrong. The monthly cadence starts here.

Start with a briefing.

Scoping happens there, so one conversation tells you which of the three shapes fits. Confidential by default, answered within one business day, one reply from a senior engineer: Steve Golter, our founder, handles these personally. No mailing list, no sequence, and nothing you share is sold or passed on.

Priority definitions, response targets, and scope are set in each executed agreement. This page describes our standard models; if anything here conflicts with an executed contract, the contract governs.