July 7, 2023
Managed IT Services can save you time, money, and headaches. But over time, your managed IT provider should be able to do more, like helping your company achieve its goals, recommend needed updates, and adjust your cybersecurity posture to counter new risks. Are you getting the most for your money? Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re not entirely sure.
Here are eight steps I’d recommend taking to see if you’re still getting what you’re paying for.
How To Audit Managed IT Services in 8 Steps
Step 1: Review Your IT Services
Quickly browse the services you have access to and the number of users that are supported by your managed IT services; this is a good time to verify that you’re utilizing the services available to you and make any adjustments to adapt to changes in your business.
Not every managed IT provider uses the same pricing model, but we price per user so our clients will know exactly what they’re getting for their money, and when their rates will change.
Step 2: Review Your Organization’s Use of Those Services
Review a summary of the service requests that were submitted and how much time they took to resolve. Identify your top requesters, top issues, and how much time was spent on proactive maintenance of your IT infrastructure. By recognizing solutions that could be implemented to reduce service tickets submitted, you will help you see if your provider is still stuck in an endless break/fix cycle.
Step 3: Review Response Times
Get the breakdown of the response time (emergency, quick or normal) required of all the service tickets submitted by your organization, and see how your provider performed against what they promised in their service level agreement (SLA).
This will help you understand the issues occurring in your organization, and whether or not your IT provider is capable of responding as needed.
Step 4: Request a Network Health Summary
It’s just as important, or perhaps even more so, to be proactive as it is to be reactive. Check the health and usage of your servers and workstations, disk space, and patching to identify anything that is outside of acceptable risk thresholds.
Proactively monitoring your environment will help identify areas for improvement and reduce the possibility of future issues.
Step 5: Review Network Specialist Findings
In addition to reviewing your standard IT service and support history, it’s important to have a network specialist do a thorough review of your infrastructure on a regularly scheduled basis. They should perform a physical inspection of your server room environment, including service equipment and other infrastructure. Additionally, it is important to check battery status, firewall updates and conduct backup restore of test files.
This is another proactive measure to prevent issues or eliminate the possibility of error or failure.
Step 6: Review Lifecycle Management
It’s good practice to assess the age and warranty of your software and equipment and keep on top of important end of support (EOS) and end of life (EOL) dates, so you can develop an effective equipment replacement schedule.
Is your current provider helping you budget for upcoming technology purchases, or suggesting replacements for software and systems that are reaching their end of support dates? If they’re not helping you with IT lifecycle management, you might get a few unpleasant budget surprises, and your aging technology is probably hiding a few cybersecurity risks.
Step 7: Emergency Contact & Procedures Plan
Before beginning your managed IT services program, you should have discussed what happens in the event of a server outage — during and after business hours. Who should be contacted and how?
During this review, make sure everything in the plan is up-to-date and accurate. If your business hours or primary points of contact have changed, adjust the document accordingly. Then, ensure the plan is available to everyone involved to effectively respond in the event of a critical outage.
Step 8: Assess New Opportunities or Changes
Finally, this review is a great opportunity to pause and reflect on the past six months, and prepare for the future.
Ensure your IT services plan matches the ongoing needs of your business by asking these questions:
- What’s new in your business?
- What are your current business challenges?
- Any newly acquired companies or mergers?
- Any changes in your facility/locations?
- Any line of business application updates/changes?
The Easiest Way To Evaluate Your Managed Service Provider
The first few steps I outlined in this blog should be fairly easy, if a bit time-consuming. But you’ll need some technical expertise to do the rest. And if the reason you’re paying a managed IT provider in the first place is that those skills are harder to come by at your organization, or your internal team is already busy with other tasks, it’s totally okay to get a second opinion from another provider.
In fact, that’s one reason businesses often take advantage of our Marco Technology Assessments. They’re not just a simple scan — we thoroughly investigate your technology and how it’s being used to identify any hidden areas of risk. We’ll present our findings in plain language to all decision-makers, so it’s easy to see where your current provider is doing a great job, and if there might be room for improvement. Before we leave, you’ll also get a 5-year technology roadmap with our recommendations of what should be upgraded immediately, and what can wait.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t have to take our word for it. Our SOC II report provides independent verification that we are following best practices, and you can always trust our recommendations. What you do with that information is up to you, but at the very least, it might give you the peace of mind that you can trust your current provider, or let you know that your gut was right — you need a new one, pronto.
