You’ve decided to hire us to provide you with Managed IT Service (an excellent choice, in my opinion) and the paperwork has been signed. Now what happens?
What Can I Expect Once We Get Started?
Before we can take on the job of monitoring, maintaining, and otherwise managing your business technology, there are a few things that need to be taken care of first. While we’re more than happy to jump in and pick up where your previous IT provider left off, we prefer to do things our way. That means doing a little housekeeping, getting an up-close look at your technology, and putting a few things in place to make the transition as smooth and uncomplicated as possible.
To accomplish all of this we have a process called onboarding, which is broken down into three phases:
Phase One: Getting Organized
Our first step is coming to your office to begin the initial clean up phase. This means resolving any immediate IT issues, deploying security software, providing staff training, starting an inventory of your software and hardware, labeling all of your computers, and documenting everything into a report, which you will receive a copy of after completion.
Essentially, phase one is us taking stock of your technology, making any necessary adjustments, and organizing your infrastructure and IT documentation so that any information we might need down the road to fix, update, remove, or replace any aspect of your IT.
Phase Two: Protecting The Data
While onsite during Phase One we’ll install our backup server, which is a physical device plugged into your network. We start by identifying where your data is located, installing backup software, and beginning the process of creating your backups. Before we make any changes at all to any part of your IT, we fully backup your data to make sure your business is protected from data loss.
The chances of losing data during our Phase One tasks is small, but the risk of files being inadvertently deleted or lost while we work to clean up and reorganize your existing infrastructure is does exist. We take every possible precaution to ensure your business data remains intact.
Phase Three: Best Practices
Once your data has been backed up, we’ll begin cleaning out your entire network. This process is different for each customer, but involves us finding flaws and gaps in your security and bad configurations within your network that have a high likelihood of leading to future issues. Depending on the size of your business this could take a few days, or a few weeks. There is a lot of ground to cover and we want to be as thorough as possible. Once we’ve gotten started, you’ll receive a detailed report of the items we find during discovery and the progress of each item until we’re done.
We will keep you in the loop every step of the way. We’ll also work to keep this process as undisruptive as possible to avoid interfering with your operations, causing as little downtime as we can. Your complete satisfaction is our number one priority, and that is true from the first moment we step into your office.
Once we wrap up Phase Three and give you our final report, the on-boarding process is complete. You can get back to business as usual, and leave your IT worries to us. We promise your technology is in good hands.
