Hiring an IT Service Provider can be an intimidating process. The options can be overwhelming and you may find yourself stumped on the best solution. However, getting excellent IT service and an all-star IT environment is attainable with the right partner. Here are the top 9 questions you should ask before hiring an IT Service Provider:
1. What is the onboarding process?
This is a critical component to your IT service experience. IT Service Providers that take the time at the beginning of your relationship to understand your environment and make recommendations to both secure and optimize your environment will make all the difference. Many IT companies couldn’t tell you their onboarding process because they don’t have one and, frankly, they aren’t proactive with the IT environments they manage. A solid onboarding process will set you and your company up for success for many years to come.
2. Will we have an IT expert dedicated to our organization?
Ask this question and be sure to filter out responses like “VCIO”. VCIO stands for Virtual Chief Information Officer which means “non-technical salesperson who doesn’t understand your IT environment“. Many IT companies leave your environment to a revolving door of low-level techs. No one truly understands the big picture strategy for your company and good luck with long-term planning. Having a high-level IT expert dedicated to your business ensures the ship is sailing the right direction and you’re able to weather any IT storms that come your way.
3. What steps do you take to ensure we experience minimal downtime?
How many hours have you wasted waiting for your computer to open slow software or waiting for an IT issue to be fixed? Imagine if your network went down and all of your files were ::poof:: gone? What if your system went down and you couldn’t serve your customers for days on end? Downtime can add up and negatively impact your business. Business is challenging enough as it is, so don’t let bad IT be your downfall. Ask your IT Service Provider what happens in these critical moments? How do you recover and how long does it take? Do they have a plan?
4. How do you protect your internal company network and our company network from being hacked by cybercriminals?
This question is critical. Cybercrime is a real threat to businesses and taking steps to mitigate cybercriminal’s efforts is paramount. You’ll want to look for a managed IT service that comes with all the essentials to protect your company network.
At Limetree Labs, every new customer has a health and security audit performed—to close common network vulnerabilities. Anti-virus and Anti-spam services are deployed to every email account and computer. Best security practices are put in place across network services. And, with our Lime and Learn training, each employee at your company is trained on how to recognize and avoid the top IT threats faced by users. In addition, we offer an enhanced IT security bundle for businesses who have increased exposure, or IT compliance needs.
5. Do you have the experience to take our company to the cloud?
This is a great question to ask a potential IT Service Provider. It’s all about balancing accessing your data from anywhere with on-prem devices that make sense for your business cost-wise.
Between our Director of IT (DOIT) and Professional Services team at Limetree Labs, we can meet with you to best plan out your cloud strategy. It is important to note that not all applications belong in the cloud and we help recognize applications or roles that would be best suited in the public cloud, which would be best to stay on-prem, or in a private cloud solution, along with the associated costs of moving to these environments.
Moving to the cloud also proposes a change in workflows, security risks, and license requirements and we help meet with our clients so we can set those expectations to help minimize any surprises on their journey to the cloud.
6. What’s your experience with data backup and disaster recovery?
When asking this question regarding backup and disaster recovery plans, you’ll want to listen for two objectives: RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery period objective). RTO describes how quickly a company can justify being down, or unable to work. Things to take into consideration around setting these objectives is availability of hardware to restore to, a failover plan of hardware that may already be in place, or a strategy to move resources to the cloud or a different location where resources are available to restore to.
RPO describes how much data you are willing to lose. For example, if a company states they are willing to accept a 3-hour RPO, they are understanding that in the case of a restore, data restored may be up to 3-hours old from the time of the outage. At Limetree Labs, we meet with our clients to discuss these two objectives and help them understand the costs/downtime associated with each to find a happy medium of cost—whether it be the financial investment required or cost to the company for the period of downtime they deem acceptable.
7. How do you work with 3rd party vendors?
The question is, who is the General Contractor of your IT Environment? Who is going to take extreme ownership to ensure your IT issues are solved? Most IT Service Providers are happy to play the finger-pointing game. Not us. It’s your printer vendor. Not us. You’ll need to talk to your Software Provider. You know the drill and it can be absolutely maddening! You just want your stuff to work and don’t want to worry about tracking down the source of your woes.
Look for an IT Service Provider that goes the extra mile to work with your 3rd party vendors to nip those IT issues in the bud. Your IT Service Provider should act as a partner, not another vendor weighing you down with more issues. You need a partner who will take ownership of your IT environment and act as your Director of IT.
8. What’s included in your Managed Service Agreement?
An obvious question to ask is: what’s included? Many IT Service Providers only offer Help Desk services and basic network administration. At Limetree Labs, our managed service offering includes all the core IT services most businesses need. IT Help Desk to handle user issues. Network administration to service and maintain servers and all network hardware. IT product procurement, to take the guesswork out of technology purchasing. And, professional services to handle IT projects and major network changes.
In addition to all these industry-standard offerings, Limetree Labs service also comes with a dedicated Director of IT to help plan and guide IT strategy, and utilize technology to improve your business.
9. Ask for References
The final question to ask a potential IT Service Provider is “Do you have references?” If you feel satisfied with their responses to the previous questions, this will give you a great view of how they serve their current customers. It’s easy to feel like “Oh, I’ve heard this before!” just to be disappointed by another poor IT service company. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Reach out to their current customers to get an idea of how service is after the initial sales pitch.
Hiring the right IT Service Partner will make a night and day difference in your business and is worth getting right. You’ll save yourself and your staff hours of time every month, not to mention the headaches that come from bad IT service. Look for a proactive IT Partner that helps you all the way from high-level strategy to day-to-day help desk.
