What Is Your IT Company Taking Care Of For You?

Selecting a company to maintain your technology is one of the most important decisions you can make for your business. You must find the most competent and reliable IT support provider in your area.

You may have found one that you’re happy with right now, but are you sure they’re doing their job? If you’re not an IT expert, it may not be easy for you to tell.

Use this checklist to audit their capabilities and performance.

Service Features

• IT support
• Cloud services
• Security management
• Network maintenance and management
• Vendor management
• IT strategy and long-term planning
• Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Service Development

• What is the average network uptime performance?
• Are on-site hours built into the regular contractual fee?
• What metrics do you use to assess speed, reliability and overall performance?
• Are you able to diagnose and remedy service issues remotely? How often do you do so?

Data Management

• Who has access to my data?
• What methods do you use to protect data?
• What redundancy gets built into the solution?
• Who owns my data that is hosted at your facility?
• How are data backups and disaster recovery handled?
• What happens to my data if you go out of business, are sold to, or merge with another firm?
• What measures and processes are in place to protect my data against security breaches or data leaks?
• Ultimately, who is responsible for my data? You, a third party, or me as the business owner?
• Do you host multiple clients on the same systems, in a multi-tenant environment or exclusivity in-area?
• Do you run your service operations through third-party hosting providers or data centers? If so, can you provide or validate these?

Qualifications, Capabilities & Service Quality

• How do you train ad-hoc support?
• Do you employ a dedicated staff, or ad-hoc?
• What industry credentials or certifications does your company, and your technical staff carry?
• How does your IT service desk team stay current with new technology developments and trends?
• When I’m required to provide an audit trail showing compliance, how does your company handle that?

Support Capabilities

• How are complex issues escalated?
• What are the first, second and third-line parameters for escalation?
• What percentage of issues are confirmed as resolved at first contact by your helpdesk?
• What type of training is provided, by your company, for my in-house IT staff to educate them?
• How do I guarantee the return on my investment covering support and organizational IT knowledge?

Do You Need A More Capable IT Company?

Maybe you’re starting to get the point now—these are the basics of what you should expect from your IT company.

That’s why you can’t settle. If you really want these services to make a difference in your daily work, you need to verify how they work and what they’re going to do for you before you sign on the dotted line.

Want to see what you could get from the right IT company? Get in touch with the Coleman Technologies team.