The Importance Of Knowing Your IT Support Team

welcome back to another episode of cappuccino chat this time we're talking about the importance of knowing your it support team all right so we want to talk about the importance of knowing your it support team and most a lot of companies are starting to Outsource their it to other companies especially the small mediumsized business it doesn't make sense to bring that staff inhouse pay all the benefits the salary all the licensing and Hardware that you still need on top of everything else going on so it's typically easier to Outsource your it than it is to bring it inhouse but with that being said you want to make sure you understand who you're Outsourcing it to and hopefully go meet those uh it support professionals go to their office see how they do things uh one of the things I always offer to new prospects as part of the uh process is to come visit our office come meet our staff see what we what we're doing how we're doing it what kind of support we provide what our office looks like I mean a lot of times you know you'll learn a lot about a company by seeing how they take care of themselves and how they take care of their company their office their vehicles those kinds of things so it's very important to really kind of know who you're getting into an agreement with now it's not to say that it companies even ours we Outsource some services to other places but it's not where they have uh they're going to interact with the client it's where we're partnering with certain best-of class providers for different security software our backup uh and Disaster Recovery again we're not hosting our own cloud environment those kinds of things we are Outsourcing that but they're not directly interacting with you and have direct access to your um infrastructure your computers so on and so forth so the reason this is kind of important kind of came to light the other month was there were some North Korean it professionals that were posing as us employees uh and this was going on with some Fortune 500 companies so they were getting access to intellectual property and things of that nature now you might say Hey you know I'm not a Fortune 500 company all this other stuff but a lot of companies are Outsourcing overseas uh Philippines um uh India those kinds of things so who are those companies using yeah you may know or trust your it provider to vet those people who are supporting you but who are they using because I I guarantee you most it providers aren't flying over to the Philippines over to India and physically going into those offices and making sure people are who they say they are I mean you hear about horror stories all the time with remote workers working multiple jobs doing different stuff so it's very important to get to know who is supporting you from an IT perspective it's very important so one of the couple things you want to ask when you are looking for an IT provider is do you Outsource any of your support to a third party uh provider or company right uh are all your employees local and in your office or how are they set up and can I visit your office I highly recommend you visit your it providers office again see what they're doing to monitor your networks I've gone on a number of uh prospecting calls where they tell me their current it provider is monitoring their systems but I find no monitoring software installed on anything other than maybe like team viewer and things of that nature go to my PC which allow them to remote in but those kinds of applications do not actively monitor the device so they're not going to tell you whether it's on or not they're not tell you if it's patched or not in apply patches um it's not going to give you a hardware and software inventory um listing for all those devices so it's not truly being monitored it's not watching the event logs it's not checking disk space and alerting on those different things so you want to make sure you're truly getting if you're not sure ask questions ask to see how they would remote in and provide that remote support what what are the what's the procedure when uh getting an alert are you going to know when my server goes offline or you're going to know when my workstation is running low on dis Bas how is that happening ask some good questions so that your comfortable understanding not all remote software is the same some remote software alerts you that somebody is on the machine others do not uh some black out the screen so you can't see what the other person's doing some do not we do not black out the screen we want you involved in that process so you can see what it is we're doing monitor what we're doing ask questions if need be so please uh when looking for an IT provider uh maybe when changing it providers is part of your process and your procedure in doing that please go visit and ask these questions of your prospective it provider if you have any questions or want to know we do things here and come visit our office and meet our team please reach out to us at 760- 77052 z z