Unless your business or role is about IT, you don’t want to be worrying about your business’ IT. You want to focus on what you do best – whether that’s providing financial advice to your clients or manufacturing. You don’t want to lost time dealing with IT troubles.
You need to have the right IT service provider for your business. And the best providers will be able to take away your pain and let you focus on your day job. But how do you know if you’re with the right IT company? Here are a few things to consider if they’re the right fit for you, or if it’s time to make a change.
The Right Size IT Provider
You’ve outgrown your current one
There isn’t a right size IT provider. What suits one business won’t suit another. If your business goes through a period of growth, gradually or rapidly, you might find that your organisation has become too big for them to keep up with.
It isn’t easy to know if you’ve outgrown your current IT provider. But you should consider:
- Are they falling behind on service requests and starting to miss SLAs?
- Are your staff and colleagues less confident in the service?
- Are they helping drive your IT strategy, or focused on fixing problems?
- Do they even offer any IT strategies?
Have a think if you’ve provided any feedback when they’ve asked for it. Are you and your team rating them highly?
They’ve outgrown you
Many small businesses rely on services from other small businesses. You may find that they have grown so much that the level of service you receive starts to dip. They may have started supporting larger clients, and are focusing more of their time supporting them, and not giving you the attention you deserve.
Enterprise-level IT support won’t suit everyone. If you’ve only got a handful of staff, you’ll want to know that your IT service provider is easy to get hold of when you need them. or if a once local provider has moved to new premises, the convenience of them coming to your offices may disappear.
They’re not there when you need them
What hours does your business operate? If your business is in operation 24/7, can you guarantee you’ll get support when you need it? For a manufacturer, what happens when an industrial inkjet printer breaks at 3am? Can you get hold of support, or will they not respond until 9am the next day?
IT Provider Performance
They’re missing SLAs
For IT businesses, meeting service level agreements (SLAs) is a good indication of their performance. They should have set out expectations for how quickly they will respond to, plan and resolve problems. If your IT provider isn’t hitting at least 95% of their SLAs, this could become cause for concern.
You want to know that when your systems go wrong, your IT provider will jump on service tickets and resolve them quickly. How much downtime can your business afford because IT systems aren’t working as they should be?
They don’t take security seriously themselves
An alarming number of IT support providers aren’t cyber secure themselves. They talk about the services they provide, but aren’t willing to practice what they preach. If your IT provider isn’t following security best practices, such as Cyber Essentials certifications, it’s probably time to consider your options.
The right IT service provider can help your business achieve a Cyber Essentials certification, to make sure your systems are compliant. Check to see whether they have the certification themselves, or better still, Cyber Essentials Plus.
Knowing if it is time to move on from your IT service provider isn’t easy, and the decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you are considering a new IT service provider, get in touch with ACUTEC to see if we would be the right fit for each other.
