• Quikteks Blog
• March 8, 2017

Have you ever had a technology expense hit you – and your budget – out of nowhere? If you have a major problem that you haven’t properly planned for, your IT budget could set you back for weeks, months or, in a worst-case scenario, years. Knowing exactly what your IT service plan covers, and what it doesn’t, is the way to make sure that you don’t get derailed by surprise bills.

What do you need your IT support to cover? Use this list to identify the situations, including out-of-hours emergencies, that could land you with unmanageable expenses.

What You Need Your IT Support to Cover

The service level agreement that you sign when you (literally!) sign up specifies what type (or types) of service your managed services provider will give you for the duration of your contract. This might vary according to the managed services provider’s business model, but there are key points to look at carefully. We promise you that this is the budget-friendly way to proceed. Ask the following questions of your managed services provider:

1. Can support requests be submitted without fear of going over your IT budget?
2. Does after-hours support incur extra charges? Are weekends and holidays included?
3. What, if any, is the maximum amount of support that you can ask for, and are there extra charges if you go over that limit?
4. In the event of a disaster, will you be charged for your data to be recovered and restored?
5. What flexibility is there – for example, if you need to add more users and workstations?
6. If you have to run backup via virtualized, cloud-based servers while faulty hardware is being replaced what are the cost implications?
7. Will expanding your data storage incur extra costs?
8. In detail, what is included in the hardware maintenance agreement? Remember that knowing what’s not covered is just as important as knowing what is.

Services You Should Go For

You may have some of these services in place already, so this list will help you identify what you still need from your managed services provider. We can assure you that the following services are all solid investments for your business:

• • Unlimited remote and on-site support
• • Active Directory administration and maintenance
• • File, folder, and share administration
• • Security administration
• • Network policy administration and enforcement
• • Managed antivirus, spyware monitoring, maintenance and problem removal
• • Data backups as often as every 15 minutes
• • Uninterrupted backups of open documents
• • Rapid data restoration
• • Intrusion security
• • Blocking of inappropriate or dangerous web content

Do you receive all these important services with your IT plan? If not, reach out to Quikteks! Our trained professionals want to help you maximize the return on your investment in your IT management. To learn more about our managed services, reach out to us at (973) 882-4644.