How to Choose a Managed I.T. Provider

If you're shopping for a Managed I.T. provider, the hard part is not comparing prices. The hard part is figuring out whether the shop across the table is going to still be the right shop for you two years from now. These are the questions we would ask, if the roles were reversed.

Questions worth asking

• What is your median response time to an urgent incident, not "guaranteed," median?
• How do you handle the departure of the technician who knows my environment?
• Can you show me a real postmortem you wrote for a real client, with names redacted?
• What is the last incident you handled badly, and what did you change as a result?
• How is compliance evidence stored, and can I export all of it if we ever part ways?

Red flags

• Won't share references from active clients (not just the landmark logos on the website)
• Every question gets answered with "our platform handles that"
• No documented onboarding, no documented escalation, no documented offboarding
• Response-time SLAs measured from ticket-creation to ticket-acknowledgement, not to resolution
• The words "trusted partner" appear more than twice in any single paragraph