Zazz vs Coastal IT: Which Managed IT Partner Fits a Growing Florida Business? (2026)

Zazz is the stronger choice for most Florida businesses comparing it with Coastal IT. Zazz publishes fixed per-user plans starting at $100 per user per month, holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications, runs 24/7 security operations in every plan, and supports offices across the US and Canada, with onsite technicians in Naples and Fort Myers. Coastal IT is a Naples, Florida firm that quotes a custom plan for each client. 

The gap shows most for companies with compliance obligations, more than one location, or a cyber insurance questionnaire waiting for answers. The sections below walk through pricing, security, certifications, hurricane readiness and Florida compliance, so you can see where each difference comes from in the Zazz vs Coastal IT decision. 

Disclosure: Zazz publishes this comparison. Coastal IT details come from its public website, reviewed on November 13, 2026. “Coastal IT” here means the managed IT firm in Naples, Florida, which is a separate company from Coastal (formerly Coastal Cloud), a Salesforce consultancy. 

Zazz vs Coastal IT at a glance 

Zazz and Coastal IT: a certified multi-region MSP and a Naples IT firm 

Zazz runs IT managed services and cybersecurity for growing organizations of up to 500 employees, with more than 100 clients across North America. Delivery follows ITIL practices, the helpdesk and network operations center work 24/7, and every client gets a dedicated Delivery Manager for escalations, reporting and quarterly reviews. Critical issues get a first response in under 10 minutes on average. The company holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 20000 and ISO 9001 certifications, and supports clients across the US and Canada, including onsite visits in Naples and Fort Myers. 

Coastal IT is an IT services firm based in Naples, Florida, that works with businesses in the surrounding area. It acts as the client’s day-to-day IT department and designs a custom plan after an initial consultation, without publishing prices or plan contents. 

Answering tickets and patching laptops is table stakes for any MSP. The differences show when a company adds a second site, signs a healthcare or payments client, hires remote staff in other states, or gets asked by an insurer to prove that someone is monitoring its systems overnight. Those are the situations this Zazz vs Coastal IT comparison focuses on. 

How does Zazz pricing compare with Coastal IT pricing? 

Zazz publishes its prices and Coastal IT doesn’t. Zazz plans start at $100 per user per month with no minimum seats and no onboarding fee, while Coastal IT builds a custom quote after a consultation. In a Zazz vs Coastal IT pricing review, that means you know what a Zazz seat costs, and what it includes, before the first call. 

Security isn’t an add-on at any level. The $100 Essential plan already covers endpoint protection, email security, SaaS backup and round-the-clock threat monitoring, with tools valued at more than $50 per user at retail built into the price. As a worked example (illustrative arithmetic, not a quote), a 40-person firm on Professional pays $5,000 a month with CIO advisory included. 

We publish our rates because a buyer shouldn’t need two sales calls to learn what a seat costs. Fixed per-user IT pricing also makes scope visible: two quotes with the same monthly total can cover very different work, and a published plan shows the inclusions before anyone signs. If you’re collecting a custom quote alongside ours, ask for the per-user price at your current headcount, a written list of exclusions, and whether 24/7 SOC monitoring is included or billed separately. 

Who watches your systems at 3 a.m.? 

Ransomware crews work when your staff are asleep. In the Sophos Active Adversary Report 2026, which analyzed 661 incident response and MDR cases, 88% of ransomware payloads were deployed outside business hours. Once inside, attackers reached Active Directory in a median of 3.4 hours, and MFA was missing in 59% of cases. A business that only gets attention between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. is exposed for most of the week. 

Every Zazz plan, Essential included, carries 24/7 SOC monitoring, managed detection and response (MDR) and SIEM log collection. Analysts watch alerts around the clock and can isolate an infected laptop at 2 a.m. rather than discover it at 9. Endpoint protection, email filtering, anti-phishing controls, domain authentication and staff security training sit in the same base price, so the protection a client gets doesn’t depend on which add-ons they remembered to buy. That bundled approach to managed security services is deliberate: small teams rarely have the time to assemble and tune separate security tools themselves. 

Coastal IT’s website says security is part of its plans but doesn’t specify whether they include a staffed 24/7 SOC, MDR or SIEM, so that’s the first question to put to its team, and to any MSP on your shortlist. In a Zazz vs Coastal IT evaluation, this is the line item we’d weigh most heavily: we’d treat round-the-clock detection as a requirement for any company that stores client data, whichever provider you choose. 

Certifications you can verify before you sign 

Your MSP holds admin access to email, files, firewalls and every laptop in the company, so its controls effectively become yours. Certifications are how you check those controls without auditing the provider yourself. 

Zazz holds all four. Coastal IT’s website doesn’t list any of them. 

This matters most when someone asks you for proof. Cyber insurers, enterprise customers and healthcare partners now send vendor questionnaires that ask who manages your IT and what evidence backs their controls. With a SOC 2 Type II MSP, you can answer by attaching the provider’s report (shared under NDA) and moving on. 

A SOC 2 report covers controls; response times come from SLAs and a test of after-hours support. Zazz gives you both: independently tested controls and an average first response under 10 minutes for critical issues. For any provider without a report, ask for its written security policies, its own cyber insurance certificate, and how it protects the admin credentials it holds for your systems. 

Hurricane season: keeping IT running when the office can’t open 

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, with its peak around September 10 and most activity between mid-August and mid-October. For a Southwest Florida business, the IT question during those months is simple: if nobody can reach the office for a week, does the company keep working? 

A provider’s own location is part of the answer. Any IT team based inside a storm’s path faces the same evacuation orders, power cuts and closed roads as its clients. We’d look for a provider whose monitoring and helpdesk run from outside the affected area, with local technicians available once it’s safe to travel. 

That’s how Zazz is set up. The 24/7 NOC and helpdesk keep watching systems and answering staff from outside the region, SaaS backup and recovery is part of the Essential plan, and Professional adds crisis management and business continuity planning. After the storm passes, onsite smart-hands technicians in Naples and Fort Myers handle physical work such as replacing a failed switch or bringing servers back up. Recovery targets and restore testing are set out under Zazz’s backup and disaster recovery service. 

A hurricane IT disaster recovery plan should be tested before June 1, whoever runs it. These five checks catch most of the gaps we see: 

1. Restore a real file and a full mailbox from backup, and time how long each takes. 
2. Test remote access and MFA from staff home networks, including on a phone hotspot. 
3. Confirm battery backup and safe shutdown for any on-site servers and network gear. 
4. Write down who can approve a failover, with phone numbers that don’t depend on company email. 
5. Agree with your provider when onsite work resumes after landfall, and who decides it’s safe. 

Florida compliance: FIPA, HIPAA and PCI DSS 

Most Florida businesses that hold customer data fall under the Florida Information Protection Act (FIPA), section 501.171 of the Florida Statutes. Four parts of it bear directly on how you choose an IT provider: 

The statute defines a third-party agent as an entity contracted to maintain, store or process personal information on a business’s behalf, and an MSP that manages your servers and backups can fit that description. Failing to notify can bring civil penalties of up to $500,000 per breach. We’d ask any MSP to commit in writing to a breach-notice window well inside the statute’s 10 days, along with what information it will hand over to support your own notices. This is general information, so confirm how FIPA applies to your business with your legal counsel.