While the disaster has affected all businesses to some extent, it’s fair to say that the IT sector is better equipped than many to face the challenges posed by working from home and the need to minimise any physical contact. It is therefore rational to expect a certain level of service of your IT support provider regardless of the challenges posed by the pandemic. 

Within this blog, we’ll go through some of the expectations you should continue to have and allow you to consider areas where your IT provider might be cutting corners.

Continuous maintenance and support when it’s required. Pre-emptive systems maintenance should resume as before. If your team are registering more support tickets than usual this may be a sign your IT provider isn’t being proactive, causing a greater number of problems.

Likewise, you should expect your provider’s Helpdesk to be staffed and operational when you expect it. Your IT support provider should continue to be receptive to support tickets, and while some delay in terms of resolution times may be acceptable due to increased demand, you shouldn’t be waiting days for simple issues to be resolved.

Consultancy & Cost-efficient solutions. If operating from home is a new notion for your business (as for many) then the changeover could prove fairly stressful and formidable. It’s important that your IT provider is able to guide you through the procedure and recommend solutions that are correctly scaled and costed. 

Solutions should be pragmatic in terms of cost, but also shouldn’t be so compromised that your business isn’t able to operate successfully. For example, if your business is ‘data heavy’ you may want to enable easy access to files through either remote access to your Office Network or by introducing a Business-Grade Cloud storage solution.

Equally, if another urgency is communication – both within your business and with clients and potential clients – your IT provider should be able to advise and execute solutions that enable video conferencing and perhaps the continued use of your office phone system by setting up cloud-based VoIP.

In the end, your support provider should understand your business well enough and also know the technology well enough to offer solutions that are a good fit for your operation.

Secure and compliant solutions. Whether you’re required to follow industry-specific codes of conduct and regulation or you fall under the all-embracing scope of GDPR, ensuring that you maintain data protection and function obediently is as important now as ever. The FCA for example, indicated that companies should ‘take all reasonable steps to meet their regulatory obligations,” in a statement before lockdown started. You should expect your IT provider to only propose solutions that allow you to meet any regulatory obligations you currently have.

The usage and storing of data is among the most common compliance considerations for businesses. Your IT provider should be able to provide your team with protected, practical devices such as laptops or tablets. They should ensure that such devices are supported, maintained, and run acceptable anti-malware protection. You may also want to consider remote device and application management to ensure access to data is tightly controlled – particularly relevant if you intend to allow staff to use their own devices. Your provider should be able to talk you through the options available to you.

Disaster recovery plans. Any IT support company worth their salt should be able to explain how they’ll retrieve your data in the event of a troublesome event such as a cyber-attack or device damage/theft. Ask your provider how they would recover your critical files, databases, applications etc, if such an event were to occur while your team are working remotely.  

The above list is not comprehensive by any means but it does provide a foundation from which to evaluate your IT provider’s performance through the Covid-19 crisis. Many outsource their IT for peace of mind, believing that their IT provider will act as a safety net to their business when disaster strikes. Consequently, if your IT provider is falling short of your expectations, you should ask yourself whether they can be trusted to look after your business in the future.

At 1-fix, we take a realistic approach to technology – ensuring our client’s systems are best protected.

If you have any concerns, questions or simply want to explore how to better secure your business, please do get in touch with the team for a FREE demonstration, consultation to explore how exposed your business might be and identify actions to take.