Eleven Things Your Managed Service Provider Should Be Telling You

Does your Managed IT Service Provider engage, collaborate, and proactively advise you on how to utilise technology better? Do they hold regular briefing and road mapping sessions to review how their Service has been to you? Are they on the ball when it comes to aligning with your business’s strategy?

Teck Genius has put together eleven things that your IT Support company should be doing to ensure you get the most value from the relationship.

1. Regular IT Strategy Sessions: Your IT can only work for you if it aligns with your company goals. Having regular strategy sessions ensures that both you and your MSP are exchanging ideas and cementing ways forward based on benefits to the business’s growth.

2. Your Cybersecurity: Your company’s data and assets are one of the most important things for your business’s survival and growth. Your business’ Cybersecurity strategy must encompass the entire organisation from people, process and technology. Ensure your IT partner has regular security briefing with you to ensure your cyber threat position is firm.

3. SLA’s: Are you having regular meetings with the MSP’s Service Manager to track ticket and issue resolution and timelines? This is important if you are to reduce time in issue resolution and to optimise the things your employees work on

4. Road Maps: Road maps and IT Strategy can go hand in glove together but calling our product-based road mapping is always a good idea. Having dedicated sessions on services and technology that you currently use and aligning any upgrades and replacements can create the path for innovation and replacements.

5. Services and Catalogue: As part of regular service reviews, is your IT Support partner presenting you with new services that can benefit your organisation? Many IT relationships stagnate as the partner defaults to an average position of keeping the clock ticking and not looking at how to progress and enhance the Service, they provide.

6. Migration Plans: Having a road map should tease out any opportunities for tech replacement, but often, you may want to keep the same platform but upgrade it with new functionality. Preparing and planning this for the time ahead is key.

7. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: How does your partner fair with its own DR and BCP and also that of your services? Is there a clear plan when an outage occurs and at what stage is a full-on BCP called? Ensuring this is in place (and testing it) can be the difference between a full-on disaster and one that is limited and controlled.

8. Infrastructure Management: Being aware of your estate and validating its secure, patched, and operational is key. Having KPI’s that can inform you of vulnerabilities and issues should be a regular thing.

9. Backup: IF your backup is a managed service via your MSP, then having regular backup reports on successes and failures is an excellent way to validate your data recovery confidence.

10. Certification and Compliance: Reviewing your partner’s certifications and compliance should be, at a minimum, a yearly practice. This ensures that any legal requirements that have been pre-agreed are still valid.

11. Cost of Service Analysis: Having regular sessions around the Service and its costs can often surface opportunities to save money. Are you having more or fewer service issues? Do you have a lower number of tickets being raised? Have you got more or fewer users? All these effects the cost to operate and how much you pay.

We hope the above has given you food for thought concerning your existing partner. Teck Genius adopt the above as part of their holistic service delivery and management capability for all our clients. To speak to us about this or anything else technology-based, please contact us here.