What are your support company ACTUALLY doing for you?

I had a meeting today with an account manager of a large IT Support company. We were discussing the good things and bad things that her employer did and how good or badly they support their clients.

One matter which got raised was to do with backup monitoring and how badly her existing employers did this. I was shocked but not at all surprised. Many companies offer a full range of what are termed as 'managed services'. A Managed Service is a concept where the provider takes over the control of the monitoring of your IT systems and fixes the problems before you even know about it.

This is great and a worthwhile service to have, we offer it ourselves. The problem arises when the company providing the service have a 'set and forget' attitude to the monitoring. There are lots of areas I could talk about here but the most important one, and the one that often gets overlooked is the backups.

The backup, which is never appreciated or taken seriously unless something goes wrong, is THE most critical element of your system. It is only when something goes horribly wrong and there is NO backup that it seems to focus the mind!

many managed service providers claim to be monitoring your backup, but to what extent? and more importantly , how do you KNOW they are?

Many companies still use tape backups but I cannot tell you how many I have walked into and they could not tell me the last time someone tried to extract some data from the tape, its scary!

At The PC Surgery we have a daily backup routine which is checked against all of our clients every single day. If we do not receive a successful notification or if there is an error we have an internal SLA(Service Level Agreement) to ensure that the problem is resolved AND tested. Yes this is time consuming and yes this is a cost to us BUT if we get the phone call that all support companies hate - "Hello, our server is dead" we can relax knowing that the backups were completed and successful.

Choosing a supplier should not be complicated...

We are currently looking at working with business partners in order to extend our range of products as well as giving out clients more options when using The PC Surgery as their IT Support company.

What has shocked me is how varied the quality of service is with different suppliers, and that's before we have even spent any money yet!

One backup provider who shall remain nameless but I would point out that they Backup Direct *ahem*, has been appalling. Three times I have tried to speak to someone who can run through ther product range, pricing and reseller structure with me and each time I am told that the reseller expert is on annual leave!!

Imagine calling your IT support company because your server was down only to be told that the expert is on annual leave!? Simply unacceptable.

I suppose in a way they have done me a favour in so much that I would never deal with a company that is so difficult to deal with BEFORE I had spent any money with them.

At The PC Surgery we educate all our staff about all our clients as well as all our services, so whilst the specific expert may well be on holiday, you can be rest assured that you wont have to wait for them to return before your problem is resolved.