Switching IT Providers

Sometimes you just outgrow a business relationship, even when the service has been great in the past.

This often happens when your company was still small, and you found a similarly small IT provider to help support you. This worked out great for a while. But then your company grew and now you have 20 employees and a much more complicated infrastructure that requires a higher level of support. That small IT provider can’t keep up anymore and falls behind with maintenance. In this case, it’s definitely time to move on.

Some signs that you’ve outgrown your provider are:

• They are on a drastically different business level than you – you have a large office and 50 computers, and they have one employee.
• They don’t offer much or anything in the way of contracts, service level agreements, or documentation.
• You notice it’s become more difficult to get problems resolved in an acceptable time frame, and/or to reach your provider when needed.
• Standard business technology services – backups, disaster recovery plans, cloud implementation, mobile device management, network audits, consulting – aren’t available or being done properly through your current IT company.
• They try to supplement their inadequate services by enlisting a client’s staff member as a “helper” – we’ve seen plenty of well-meaning office managers and admins roped into working on issues themselves because the IT support company can’t keep up.

Are you constantly noticing the same issues popping up? Are your computers, phones, internet service, etc unreliable and causing downtime? Does important software crash while you’re working? Does it seem like you’re calling for help more than doing your actual job?

These are all clear signs that you aren’t getting what you’re paying for. IT’s first priority should be to make sure you are working on reliable, secure, and fast devices that support your operations.

Unplanned outages, downtime, and slow devices are unacceptable in a world where businesses rely on their technology.

Backups are your insurance against data loss. Without them, should something happen such as a natural disaster or ransomware infection, you’ve lost weeks, months, even years of your business.

Best backup and continuity practices are to backup both on- and off-site. You should have both a local backup, such as on a physical server, hard drives, flash drives, etc; and a copy elsewhere such as in a cloud service. This will ensure that if, for example, your office building floods and destroys the physical copies you’ll still have that data.

Backups should also be run regularly. This will vary depending on your business. Think about how much data you could survive without if it disappeared – one hour’s worth, one day, one week? Your backup schedule should take this into consideration.

This is another area that can be tough to audit without experience. If you suspect your backups aren’t sufficiently protecting you from data loss, we recommend finding an outside consultant to test them. We’ve often found that backups were corrupted, not running on the needed schedule, or severely outdated which is extremely risky for any business. The worst time to find out there’s something wrong with your backups is when you need them!