A managed IT service is an information technology (IT) task provided by a third-party contractor. 

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In a managed service arrangement, the managed service provider retains responsibility for the functionality of the IT service and equipment, and the customer pays a regular fee for receipt of the service. A managed IT service comes with a service-level agreement (SLA ), which is the contract between the service provider and the customer. The SLA identifies what services the provider will furnish and how successful delivery of services will be measured. 

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With the advent of cloud computing, managed IT services have expanded to include cloud providers that offer a cloud service such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS). 

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