Are you sure you are getting what you pay for in IT services?

ONE of the great dilemmas for business leaders is figuring out what level of support is needed to keep your information technology (IT) systems secure and up to speed.

This is an area of business that is often handed over to IT ‘experts’ because it is an area that is beyond most companies’ levels of experience. IT management is often ‘entrusted’ to people that are ‘trusted’ to do what they say they can do. 

However it is very difficult for business owners and leaders to ascertain whether they are actually receiving the services promised by an IT company, according to SuretyIT technology director Geoff Stewart, who has seen some disturbing examples in recent years.

“We have recently taken over support for a business that has been having some trouble around their IT systems and support,” Mr Stewart said. “Their current servers are hosted with a third party provider and they pay a considerable amount to this company each month. 

“One of the services they pay for is ‘Hot Disaster Recovery’ which is supposed to allow for recovery from anything from a catastrophic failure in their whole server infrastructure down to a single server failure.  They are a 24/7 business and have huge reliance on their IT systems and their continued reliability. 

“It appears though that they were paying for a service that they weren’t actually receiving,” he said. 

Mr Stewart discovered that in April his client company had a significant failure on its Exchange (email) server “which could not be recovered from”.

The third party company was called and asked to invoke the disaster recovery or image recovery for that server.

“To which the reply came, ‘We don’t provide that service for you’.  When we told the business what the third party hosting provider had said, they were astonished as clearly stated on their contract was Hot Disaster Recovery and ‘image backup’,” Mr Stewart said.

“I think the scariest aspect of this issue was that our customer had signed the contract 18 months previously, had put their trust in this provider to deliver the service they had signed up for and yet the fact was they were not receiving some of the absolutely critical services they had signed up for. 

“Needless to say the customer has asked us to look for an alternative hosting provider who they can trust and who they know will deliver the service they are paying for.

“What this made me question, was how many other businesses are putting their complete trust in their IT provider, assuming they are getting the service they are paying for but are actually not?”

Mr Stewart advised business leaders to always ask IT service providers the tough questions, “to get them to prove to you that you are getting the service you are paying for”. 

Mr Stewart said SuretyIT had developed a standard set of practices to help businesses guard against such problems:

Make sure you are provided with a meaningful monthly report that details the health of your systems.

If your IT service provider is responsible for checking your backups, make sure they perform test restores as well and get you involved in the process.

If they provide you with a disaster recovery service make sure that there is a test performed at least on an annual basis, you are involved in it and are asked to sign off on it.

If you have had a significant systems issue, make sure that your IT service provider provides you with a post mortem report that details what happened, how it was fixed and what is being put in place to prevent it from happening again.

If your IT provider is not performing, not providing you with the information or services you need or blinding you with technical jargon – change to another one.  It may be daunting, but there are plenty of good ones out there that can make a real difference to the success of your business and make the transition straight forward. 

SuretyIT is an Industry Expert member of the Queensland Leaders, Victorian Leaders and NSW Leaders organisations that are mentoring and developing the next generation of leading Australian companies.  SuretyIT offers what it calls a Technology Performance Health-check to help provide management with an overview of what they are paying for and what they are getting for their IT spend.

www.suretyIT.com.au

www.vicleaders.com.au

 

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