If you had an internal IT team, you would want them to be proactive – right?

You would want them to prevent issues from occurring. To look for ways to make you more secure, more efficient and plan for the future, driving your business forward and helping you get the most out of your investment in technology.

So why wouldn’t you want the same from your outsourced IT provider or MSP (Managed Service Provider)?

Unfortunately, traditional outsourced IT support is not designed to deliver this. It’s intended to be reactive, to wait for things to go wrong and then respond and fix them. That’s why it’s called support or in our world ‘reactive support’.

Don’t get me wrong; you still need an element of reactive support, especially where people and technology meet, but to get the best out of your investment in technology, you need your IT provider to be truly proactive.

The problem is, many IT providers say they’re proactive, so what does being truly proactive mean?

For the majority of IT providers that say they’re proactive, they’re referring to the tools they use to ‘proactively’ monitor your systems. These tools raise alerts on their ticketing system when something goes wrong, and then they react to the tickets and resolve the issues. Working this way is reactive, not proactive.

The reality is that keeping a business’s IT systems running efficiently and secure requires more than tools. It requires planning, it requires documentation, it requires process, and above all, it requires time.

That’s why at Onebyte, we have roles dedicated to being 100% proactive.

So here are four things to ask yourself about your current IT service provider to see if they are truly proactive.

1. Do they use standards to assess your IT systems and identify gaps in efficiency, security and compliance?
2. Do they make regular scheduled onsite visits to assess and align your systems and processes to these standards?
3. Do they provide documented findings from their alignment visits to support their recommendations based on their understanding of your business’s initiatives?
4. Do they have a strategic plan for your business to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in 12-18 months and beyond?

Are you interested in finding what a difference a truly proactive approach to your IT will make to your business?

At the core of Onebyte’s Technolgy Success is a truly proactive process that your organisation needs to protect itself and make your people and technology brilliant together.

Call us or use the contact form below to get in touch and book a 40-minute intro meeting to find out just how brilliant.