Do you offer after-hours support, and if so, what is the guaranteed response time?
Our Answer: Any good I.T. company will answer their phones LIVE (not voice mail or phone trees) and respond from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every weekday. But many CEOs and executives work outside normal “8 to 5” hours and need I.T. support both nights and weekends. Not only can you reach our after-hours support any time and any day, we GUARANTEE a response time of one hour or less for normal problems, and within 15 minutes for problems marked “emergency,” such as a network being down or a critical problem that is significantly impacting your ability to work.
Do you meet with your clients quarterly as part of your managed services agreement?
Our Answer: To us, there’s nothing more important than face-to-face time with our clients. Therefore, we make it a priority to meet with all our clients at least quarterly (sometimes more often) to provide a “technology review.”
In these meetings, we provide you with the status updates of projects you’re working on and of the health and security of your network. We also make recommendations for new equipment and upgrades you’ll be needing soon or sometime in the near future. Our quarterly meetings with you are C-level discussions (not geek-fests) where we openly discuss your business goals, including your I.T. budget, critical projects, compliance issues, known problems and cyber security best practices.
Our goal in these meetings is to help you improve operations, lower costs, increase efficiencies and ensure your organizational productivity stays high. This is also your opportunity to give us feedback on how we’re doing and discuss upcoming projects.
If I need or want to cancel my service with you, how does this happen and how do you offboard us?
Our Answer: Make sure you carefully review the cancellation clause in your agreement. Many I.T. firms hold their client's hostage with long-term contracts that contain hefty cancellation penalties and will even sue you if you refuse to pay.
We would never “force” a client to stay with us if they are unhappy for any reason. Therefore, we make it easy to cancel your contract with us, with zero contention or fines. Our “easy out” agreements make us work that much harder to exceed your expectations every day so we keep your business.
If I were to experience a location disaster, pandemic shutdown or other disaster that prevented me from being in the office, how would you enable me and my employees to work from a remote location?
Our Answer: If Covid taught us anything, it’s that work-interrupting disasters CAN and DO happen when you least expect them. Fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes can wipe out an entire building or location. Covid forced everyone into lockdown, and it could happen again.
We could experience a terrorist attack, civil unrest or riots that could shut down entire cities and streets, making it physically impossible to get into a building. Who knows what could be coming down the pike? Hopefully NONE of this will happen, but sadly it could.
That’s why you want to ask your prospective I.T. consultant how quickly they were able to get their clients working remotely (and securely) when Covid shut everything down. Ask to talk to a few of their clients about how the process went. Here’s how we handled our clients’ needs when it seemed everyone needed to work remotely, get laptops and implement security measures almost overnight.
One of our medical clients needed a new phone system built over night because their current on-premise phone system did not meet their needs during the pandemic. We not only built a new one over night – but we gave them remote access to all systems to be able to operate during the pandemic. Most importantly - they were able to work remotely and continue to engage with their patients.
Can you provide a timeline of how long it will take to get my network back up and running in the event of a disaster?
Our Answer: There are two aspects to backing up your data that most business owners aren’t aware of. The first is “fail over” and the other is “fail back.” For example, if you get a flat tire, you would fail over by putting on the spare tire to get to a service station where you can fail back to a new or repaired tire.
If you were to have a disaster that wiped out your data and network – be it a ransomware attack or natural disaster – you want to make sure you have a fail-over solution in place so your employees could continue to work with as little interruption as possible. This fail-over should be in the cloud and locked down separately to avoid ransomware from infecting the backups as well as the physical servers and workstations.
But, at some point, you need to fail back to your on-premise network, and that’s a process that could take days or even weeks. If the backups aren’t done correctly, you might not be able to get it back at all.
So, one of the key areas you want to discuss with your next I.T. consultant or firm is how they handle both data backup AND disaster recovery. They should have a plan in place and be able to explain the process for the emergency fail-over as well as the process for restoring your network and data with a timeline.
In this day and age, regardless of natural disaster, equipment failure or any other issue, your business should ALWAYS be able to be operational with its data within six to eight hours or less, and critical operations should be failed over immediately.
We understand how important your data is and how getting your team up and running quickly is essential to your business success. Therefore, in the event of any disaster, we can confidently get your network back up and running in 8 hours or less.
