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When looking at managed IT service providers (MSPs), many business leaders think that since providers essentially offer the same IT services, then higher service fees mean higher service quality. However, are you really getting premium services by paying premium price tags? And are those services truly helping you achieve your business goals? Here are tell-tale signs that you’re overspending on IT services:
You Don’t Know Where You Stand When It Comes to IT Issues
The quality of a client-provider relationship is reflected in the quality of communications between the two parties. When the provider communicates poorly and always has to be pushed to respond to your concerns, they become the source of frustration and stress — the very things you’re paying them to keep away from you.
A concrete example of subpar communication is failing to bridge language gaps or to explain technical issues to non-technical audiences such as yourself. Another is a lack of responsiveness. While you’re suffering a DDoS attack and losing thousands of dollars in potential sales, you don’t want to wait hours for your MSP to get back at you.
As a whole, you want to establish service level agreements (SLAs) that your MSP must abide by or else be penalized monetarily. Moreover, to ensure that your MSP keeps to the SLAs, they must have a complete ticket management system. This system ought to grant you visibility into everything your MSP is doing for you.
You Keep Suffering the Same Problems
When it comes to tech issues, you don’t want to feel like you’re living out the movie Groundhog Day. You don’t want to call your MSP about an issue, have it resolved, then call them up again the next day because the issue recurred. Worse still is having to explain everything as if you were calling for the first time. Why pay for a problem-solver that can’t solve problems?
You want your MSP to be able to discern recurring issues and dig deep to find root causes and resolve them. You also want complete documentation in the form of root cause analyses and incident response reports so that you’ll have a high degree of certainty that tech problems were indeed solved in a more lasting fashion.
You Spend So Much on Cybersecurity, Yet Still Suffer Costly Data Breaches
Data security is in itself a broad and deep subsection of IT. You have to guard against malware and insider threats, comply with relevant data regulations, and implement business continuity and disaster recovery plans. However, you don’t want to get every cybersecurity solution out there because that’ll needlessly drain your coffers. Instead, you and your MSP have to be strategic on how to protect your data by assessing your IT infrastructure, identifying what needs protecting, finding your riskiest vulnerabilities, and determining the most cost-effective ways to mitigate those vulnerabilities.
You Do Tasks That You’ve Outsourced
What’s the point of paying someone to do something for you when you end up doing it yourself? For example, if an important business app is offline, you want your MSP to tell you that they spotted the issue and are working to resolve it. You don’t ever want to call your provider and be the one to alert them of the problem because you pay them to monitor your network and proactively solve problems as they occur.
All-in-all, you want to be strategic in how you spend your IT budget and get what you pay for. To have a better gauge of how much tech services should cost (and avoid overspending), check out our managed IT services pricing calculator.
