Green Flags and Red Flags for MSPs
How do you know when you’ve outgrown your current IT Support provider? or how do you pick the best service from all?
MSPs can provide numerous benefits to your organization such as increased flexibility, heightened security, scalability, predictable IT budgets, and more. Unfortunately, not all MSPs offer the same level of service, reliability, and customer service.
If you’re concerned that your MSP is not performing as well as they should be, it may be time to switch. If you’re unsure, here are some green flags and red flags that you should be paying attention to when choosing your tech provider.
- Lack of Communication
Beyond knowing what’s happening within your network, you should also have a good relationship with frequent communication from your MSP. Where you can be frank and honest, discussing where you are happy, what needs to change, and how you are feeling about their service.
-
Major Security Incident(s)
Security breaches are one of the biggest reasons to hire a competent MSP. The average cost of a security breach in the US last year was $4 Million for all the costs of data recovery, hiring forensics, and rebuilding after a major breach. Part of good security is understanding how it all fits together, not just running an antivirus software and calling it done.
-
Same problems keep happening — again (and again)
Ever feel like you’re watching Groundhog Day with your current IT support provider? You called about a performance problem for your computer and the MSP says to reboot. It seems to fix the issue for a day, but it keeps coming back. And every time, they continue to troubleshoot the symptom as if it were the first time you were calling. Instead, your MSP should have a problem management process to identify reoccurring incidents and get to the root cause so that issues don’t fester or continue.
-
Lack of technical skills
Hiring and retaining top talent is a challenge for employers everywhere. This is especially true for IT staff and even more challenging in the SF Bay Area. Instead of hiring certified and trained technical resources and heavily vetting them to ensure they are both a technical and (most importantly) a cultural fit, some MSP’s try to solve this problem is by hiring inexperienced resources and try to bring them up to speed via OJT (On the Job Training). We don’t recommend this approach as a general business practice.
- Technical expertise
Fundamentally, an IT team is responsible for taking a strategic view of a business’s IT environment and aligning technology-based solutions with goals and opportunity development. There are different levels of technical expertise, from basic troubleshooting to more advanced network administration. An MSP with substantial technical expertise can be invaluable in fulfilling this role for you.
- Flexibility and scalability
All businesses are different, and a good MSP will take the time to understand your unique requirements, challenges, and needs, rather than offer a cookie-cutter approach. Similarly, the services they offer, from data plans and telephony options to business applications and hardware, must suit you. Don’t be duped by a long list of inclusions; you could end up paying for a dozen services that you don’t need.
- Transparency
You should know at a glance what your MSP has done, is doing, and will do to your infrastructure. This encourages openness and accountability and is critical to data security, as well as long-term IT planning.
- Proactiveness
A good MSP makes IT management invisible — rather than reacting to issues as they occur, a reliable MSP will do all they can to prevent them from occurring in the first place.