Are you a small company needing more consistent IT support? Do you have an internal IT team but you need more support outside of working hours with access to technical experts for upcoming projects? Is your current IT support contract coming up for renewal? Are you are not sure whether you should continue with the same company or change? As there are many IT Support Provider companies out there, finding one that you can rely on to meet your needs and your budget can be challenging. When selecting the right IT partner to support your IT infrastructure there are several key indicators to look out for. Read on for the first of our three-part series in which we will discuss these key indicators further.
24/7 Support
Is your IT support partner able to provide the support you need during all the times that you need them? If the IT support providers only operate Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm and you have overseas clients or work going on out of standard local operational hours and you come across an issue, then what happens? You don’t want to not have access to the support you need or have to pay huge out-of-hours fees. At the same time, you need to be sure that the provider operates 365 days a year with sufficient resources available; their staff medical leave should not become your headache.
24/7 Monitoring and Reporting Services
Your company may operate from 9am to 5pm but your IT infrastructure operates all day, every day. Your IT can suffer a glitch at any time – day or night. You may have monitoring systems set up but who is monitoring your monitoring systems? And if there is an outage you need to know the facts. You want to know when it happened/is happening, how long it was down for and, most importantly, what caused it. It is vital that you have full confidence in your IT support. You should know that your IT infrastructure is continuously monitored so that it is functioning optimally at all times. Meanwhile, when there is planned or unplanned downtime, full post-event reports should be available for further future proofing.
Full Onboarding Service
Your IT Support Partner should know your IT equipment almost better than you do. A full onboarding internal audit of your equipment is necessary. This audit gathers information on your IT infrastructure which would include the type and number of equipment in service, serial numbers with vendor warranty details, licensing information as well as network environment, WAN connection, internet and file sharing service details.
Offer Loan Services
Your IT Support Provider should do exactly that – they should support you. If there are planned or unplanned changes or fixtures you should have support equipment available in the event of a failure. Having a full set of IT backup equipment would be costly but your IT support provider should be able to provide this, on a loan basis, to help keep your IT working away in case there are any unexpected issues during these changes.
Look out for the second part for more key indicators and services you should expect from your IT Support Provider and check out the IT Support Packages offered by Global ITN.
