4 Tips to Choosing the Best IT Support Provider

The new era of managed IT services has arrived, and its evolution has transformed service delivery and IT infrastructure operations within the last couple of years. With managed IT services, you can rely on an IT support provider to take over the tech elements of your business so that your onsite staff can focus on more strategic projects for your company’s overall growth. Here are four tips that can help you select the best IT support provider:

Assess the level of support they can provide.

Quality IT support depends on how much access you have to your IT provider and their support availability when something goes wrong. Your managed service provider of choice should boast around-the-clock, 24/7 availability to ensure that your network stays running optimally at all times. This way, you can head out of the office doors at the end of the work day with peace of mind knowing that they’ve got your back.

Look for someone who understands ROI.

As a manager, you are always looking for ways to improve business processes and performance. If your IT support provider is adept enough to quantify how their support system saves you time and money, your organization will be well served. ROI, or return on investment, is a way of comparing what you did in the past with what you plan to do in the future in order to determine where and how much the potential savings are. By partnering with someone who understands the importance of ROI, you’ll be able to take your business to new heights and see revenue-generating results.

Security remains key.

Keeping your enterprise data secure is a top priority for organizations of all sizes and industries. Making sure that your IT support provider offers security solutions to protect your business is a vital part of your decision-making process. In one instance, a small IT provider won a substantial contract by showing a large enterprise that they were using insecure communications to reach their offsite vendors when talking about sensitive intellectual property matters. They made some simple, inexpensive changes that allowed their client to contact their vendors using encrypted communications. This minor change made a huge difference in their overall security disposition. When you go about in choosing an IT partner, ensure that they are able to detect and address security issues that you may have overlooked.

Scalability is always a question.

Depending on how fast your firm has expanded, you may be very familiar with what growth is like and how to manage it. IT support is one business where doing theoretical load testing of your new partner in advance is a good idea. To do so, you merely need to provide them with a few scenarios that show your company at its peak and find out how they are equipped to handle it. A scalable and flexible IT infrastructure is key to your business success as you experience changes throughout time.

A good IT support provider should be capable of evolving with you and wearing more hats as technology becomes integrated into the Cloud. By looking at scalability, security, and synergy, you can end up helping your firm find a stronger, long-term partner for support.

To learn more about the IT solutions we offer here at NorthLight IT, contact us today for a free consultation! We’d love to meet with you.