Tip of the Week: 8 Essential Questions to Ask of Your IT Provider

When was the last time that your organization had an unexpected technology expense blast your IT budget out of the sky? Surprise issues that you don’t plan for could potentially derail your budget for months, or even years, depending on the severity of it. Having a clear idea of what your IT service plan covers is a great way to make sure that you don’t get hit by surprise billing.

We’ve put together a list of scenarios that you’ll want your IT support to cover. This way, you can avoid situations where you get unexpected bills from IT work performed on weekends, during off-hours, or on holidays.

Situations You Want Your IT Provider to Cover
When you sign up for IT support, you sign what’s called a service level agreement. This determines what type of service you receive throughout the course of your relationship with the managed service provider. Of course, this could change depending on your provider’s business model, but there are some specifics that you want to keep an eye out for. Trust us when we say that your budget will thank us later.

Here are a few questions that you should ask when determining your service agreement with your IT provider.

• Can your employees submit a support request without worrying about exceeding the IT budget?
• Will you be charged more for after-hours support? Are you covered on weekends and holidays?
• Is there a maximum amount of support that you can receive and would there be any excessive charges if you went over?
• Will you be charged for data recovery in the event of a disaster scenario?
• Will you have the flexibility to add more users and workstations?
• What kind of fees are there for running backup solutions off of virtualized, cloud-based servers while you’re waiting to replace your faulty hardware?
• Are there additional costs for expanding your data storage?
• What are the details behind your hardware maintenance agreement? If there are specific parts that aren’t covered, find out which ones.

Services You Should Want
Once you’ve determined which services you currently have, you can contrast it with what you still need. Here is a list of go-to services that you can count on being solid investments for your organization.

• Unlimited remote and on-site support
• Active Directory administration and maintenance
• File, folder, and share administration
• Security administration
• Network policy enforcement and administration
• Managed antivirus, spyware monitoring, maintenance, and removal
• Data backups as often as every 15 minutes
• Take backups of open documents without interruption
• Rapid data restoration
• Block inappropriate or dangerous web content in the workplace
• Intrusion security

Does your IT plan cover these important services? If not, reach out to Washington Works! Our trained professionals want to help you maximize the return on investment that you get for your IT management. To learn more, reach out to us at 301-571-5040.