How to maintain control while successfully outsourcing your IT

How to maintain control while successfully outsourcing your IT

Having a managed IT services provider (MSP) handle your IT is a great way to maximize productivity. For instance, MSPs have the expertise and resources to handle every aspect of your business's IT infrastructure, ensuring smooth and seamless operations all the time. However, while MSPs, have the skills to manage your technology, you still need to maintain a level of control over what they do to ensure alignment with your business goals and to protect your data.

Here are some tips and strategies for maintaining control over your outsourced IT:

Clearly define your IT needs and goals

When engaging with an MSP, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your IT needs and business goals. If you can explain to your MSP these points in detail, they will know how to act if there is any uncertainty or you can’t be reached for a key decision.

Ensure that you can show your MSP:

  • Your pain points and the required services to address them
  • Your business goals and how you expect them to assist you in achieving them
  • Your business goals and how you expect them to assist you in achieving them

With this information in hand, your MSP can act even if you aren’t around.

Establish clear contracts and service level agreements (SLAs)

Well-defined contracts and SLAs are essential for setting expectations and maintaining control, so thoroughly examine any proposed by your MSP. Ensure they include detailed outlines of their services and the standards you will hold them to, including penalties and incentives for failing or exceeding these targets. This ensures you have recourse should a dispute arise and enables you to determine how much or how little the MSP is involved in certain aspects of your IT.

Don’t neglect security

Your data’s safety is ultimately your responsibility, so establish and enforce a detailed data protection policy that your MSP must adhere to. Also, ensure that you have a hand in any incident response plan so that you are never out of the loop when it comes to important events.

There’s also no reason to trust your MSP more than your own employees, so integrate their technicians and engineers into your access control systems so you have a clear activity log.

Conversely, if they operate intrusion detection system (IDS) software, make certain you also have access so that you have better visibility into what’s going on with your cybersecurity.

Monitor performance

Regularly monitoring the performance of your MSP gives you an idea of what they’re doing with your IT and provides evidence for any disputes you have with the SLA. Request regular reports from your MSP, but also independently track your established KPIs. If the MSP fails to meet the agreed-upon standards, these performance reports give you recourse to force a resolution.

Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that, but by monitoring your MSP and asking for their service metrics, it shows that you are keeping an eye on things. This helps you ensure that your IT provider is working toward the goals you established and the standards you set.

Choose the right IT services provider

If your MSP is not reliable, does not mesh well with your business culture, is not open to dialogue, or communicates poorly, you’ll struggle to maintain control no matter what you do. So make sure you choose an MSP that is willing to collaborate with you.

When considering potential MSPs, pay close attention to their testimonials and case studies to see how they collaborate. Also evaluate their compatibility with your organization, polling other stakeholders in your organization as needed.

But once you have partnered with a reliable MSP that knows what you expect of them and keeps their services aligned with your goals, you’ll find that the benefits are worth all the extra hassle you went through with the vetting process. If you’d like to learn more about how outsourcing your IT can boost your company’s productivity, download this free eBook.


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