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Info-Tek The Computer Guys |
What to Look For in a Managed Services Provider
The reasons
for deciding to engage a managed services provider as a strategic business
resource for your business may be obvious; cost savings, security, reliability,
peace of mind - just to name a few. Now comes the tricky part, how to
decide which managed services provider is best for your business. In
order for you to make the best decision possible take into consideration the
following factors when sizing up the vastly competitive world of managed
services providers.
Costs
and Cost Savings: To a certain degree cost is always one of the key deciding
factors in any business decision; and it is certainly a consideration when
choosing a managed services provider. When factoring how much these
services will cost your business, first ensure that you are comparing apples to
apples, and consider the cost savings you may realize from increased proactive
support which will maximize your uptime and productivity; as well as the benefits
of the ability to budget for your support on a predictable monthly flat-fee
subscription basis..
Agreement
Review: Obtain a detailed agreement outlining exactly what services will
be provided by the agreement, and what services are not covered, but instead
billed in addition to the standard flat monthly fee. Verify what type of
support is included in the agreement, and if the support is twenty four hours a
day, seven days a week or if there will be extra charges for your after-hours
or weekend support needs.
Qualified
Personnel: Ascertain that potential providers not only have qualified and
certified staff in the areas of expertise that your business requires; but also
inquire as to what type of programs they have in place to keep their personnel up
to date on the latest IT developments and technologies available.
Maintenance,
Monitoring and Security: Verify that services include
frequent, periodic hardware and software checks for the latest security patches
and updates. Services should also include remote monitoring of your
systems twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week, allowing the provider the
ability to identify and address potential problems before they have the
opportunity to escalate to service outages or crisis situations.
This monitoring
needs to encompass the total security of your entire infrastructure, including
your firewall, email, anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions.
Backups
and Remote Data Storage: Make certain to select a vendor that has the ability to
fully restore your systems at any time under any circumstances in the event of
disaster or data loss; whether caused by a security breach, disgruntled
employee, virus, or natural disaster. This level of service should be
provided through both local and remote backup and storage capabilities by the
managed services provider, and governed by a robust backup schedule, whose
effectiveness should be regularly verified through regular test restores of data
- you can never be too careful with your critical business and client data.
Reports: Any
qualified managed services provider should provide at a minimum quarterly
status and service reports detailing: overall system performance, potential
problem areas, and areas of opportunity for improvement. This data should
provide you with the information you need in order to make better business
decisions regarding your information and technology services, with the
objective of supporting your budgeting for technology
and infrastructure improvements that will continue to reduce your costs,
improve your efficiencies, mitigate business pain and reduce risk.
Customer
Satisfaction and Referrals: Request a list of references from potential providers of a
subset of their clients that are in the same or a similar line of business or
industry as you are. When contacting these references, inquire about
their overall level of satisfaction. In addition, inquire specifically
about how long it took for the provider to "on-board" them, or
implement their services, the number and frequency of system failures they may
have experienced since engaging the provider's services, any resulting downtime
from failures and the provider's response time and overall time to completely
resolve the situation.
Deciding on a
managed services provider for your business can seem like a daunting task
simply due to the overwhelming number of choices in the marketplace. You
can streamline the decision-making process by putting together an outline based
on the mentioned, with sub topics addressing your specific business
needs. Use a basic system to score potential providers in each category
(pass/fail, or a scale of one through ten), tally up the total scores from each
and see if the scores line up with your overall "gut instinct"
impression.