When a company goes looking for IT technical support, what it is really looking for is to stop losing whole mornings. The word “support”, however, is used for very different things: from a number to ring all the way to a team that designs, maintains and monitors your entire infrastructure.
The three levels, no mystery
The industry organises support into levels. It is not empty jargon: it tells you who picks up and what they can actually solve.
- Level 1 · service desk. The day-to-day: passwords, email, printers, permissions, staff joining and leaving. It resolves the bulk of what comes in and it is what the office notices most.
- Level 2 · systems and networks. Servers, virtualisation, active directory, backups, VPN, network. It steps in when level 1 escalates and also for planned work: patching, updates, configuration changes.
- Level 3 · engineering. Performance, architecture, high availability, incidents that have no manual and decisions that shape the next few years.
A provider with only level 1 will sort out your printers and leave you stranded the day the storage fails. One with only level 3 will cost you a fortune to change a password.
What the contract should include
- Response times in writing and different according to severity. “As soon as possible” is not a commitment.
- Monitoring, so they find out before you do that something is wrong.
- Management and verification of the backups, with documented restore tests.
- An up-to-date inventory of equipment, licences and passwords — and one that belongs to you.
- A monthly report of what has happened and what is coming.
- On-site support either included or priced in advance, not improvised.
Questions that separate the wheat from the chaff
- Who picks up, and at what level? Is there out-of-hours cover, and who staffs it?
- When was the last backup restore you carried out, and how long did it take?
- What happens to my data, my documentation and my passwords if I stop working with you?
- What falls outside the contract, and how is it quoted before the work is done?
“If I sack you tomorrow, what do you hand over and how quickly?” It is still the best question you can ask an IT provider.
What it costs
It depends on two things: how many of you there are and how long the business can afford to stop. Providing 24/7 support to a team of seven is not the same as to one of fifty with production that cannot stop. So be wary of anyone who gives you a price over the phone without asking a single question: either they are going to break it or they have already built the risk margin in.
