Running a business comes with enough responsibilities. It is important to delegate some of them from time to time to ensure that the business runs as effectively as it can. This means having IT services to take care of all of your digital needs.
There are a lot of IT companies out there, making it tougher to determine who the good companies and the bad companies are. There are four things in particular that you should be looking for when choosing a dedicated IT service.
1. Availability
Without a doubt, the most important thing about choosing a managed IT service is their availability. Computer network issues don’t adhere to business hours when a problem arises, so you shouldn’t be limited to business hours from your IT service.
The best managed IT providers are 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, 365 days each year. Simply put, they need to be there for you whenever you need them, day or night. Not having access to their services could have a drastic impact on your business at the worst possible times.
2. Fast Response Times
That availability is great so long as someone answers and attends to your issue sooner rather than later. There are far too many IT service providers out there who get a ticket and are slow to react in response, which does little for your company.
By having a fast response time, it means getting to your needs as quickly as possible. All of which means troubleshooting and resolving the issue sooner rather than later so that you can get back to normal. Look for guaranteed response times when choosing IT services and you can at least have comfort that issues will be attended to in short order.
3. On-Site Support
There are more than a few managed IT companies that only provide over-the-phone support. That may be fine for shoestring budgets, but it won’t quite cut it for larger organizations that have more diverse needs.
Providing on-site support means that they will come out and attend to the needs of your organization. It also means working with those in a position to create and maintain a proper IT service plan that is best for the organization. None of that is provided by a service company that only does phone or online appointments.
4. Monitoring and Testing
Just about any managed IT service will respond to issues as they happen. But the very best will do more than that. They will take the steps to test different potential vulnerabilities and ensure that constant monitoring is implemented.
Being proactive in the security of an organization is what helps to keep issues from popping up in the first place. Being able to resolve issues is fine and well but being able to prevent them altogether means less downtime, less potential risk, and less of a hassle for the organization at large. This is perhaps the most important feature to consider.