Held Hostage By your Outsourced IT
Are your Managed IT Services holding you Hostage!
Does Your IT Firm Lease you equipment? If so you need to read this!
What to look out for when Managed IT Service Firms negotiate service terms!
Beware of the pitfalls and traps common of most Managed IT Services.How outsourced IT firms will trick clients into leasing hardware rather than purchasing, raising overhead costs upwards of 10 times or more than actually purchasing hardware outright.
Discussed below:
How IT companies will sell you on services and equipment that you don’t need.
How IT companies will offer services and installations that can ultimately lock you into a service contract that you will be unable to or too costly to leave.
How IT companies will negotiate leasing of hardware at costs often time 10 times the cost of the hardware itself.
Why a Service contract should always be designed around the client and their ability to change providers, not securing
Why dealing with costs should be upfront and not based on recommendations offered
Having worked in the industry for over 18 years I have identified some of the greatest and worse techniques employed by both Outsource and In-house IT organizations. This enables me to bring to light some of the worse tricks and most un-ethical practices being used in the market today. This also allows me to recommend proper courses of action to protect yourself and your business for misleading deals and recommendations from IT companies wanting nothing more than to lock you into a service contract and threatening to shut you down unless you pay.
Any IT plan lacking the ability for change or locking themselves in place, is out for one thing and one thing only, Your Hard Earned Money!!!
Don’t get me wrong, the world of business is the business of making Money. The qualifier to this statement however is Quality and Value for Valued Service.
Don’t let some fly by night salesman sell you on services or leasing equipment that you already have, allowing them to systematically change and re-configure your environment in a way that cannot survive without their hardware or some re-organizational change structure that is designed in a way by which only they have the means to manage.
Think of it this way, is it more costly for you to afford two weeks of down time, hundreds or even thousands of dollars on re-connectivity and loss of production and set up of old equipment, or simply deal with the hassle of the lied promise of a great IT platform and receiving simply a help desk that googles your questions for you and continues offering you substandard service.
They know this and this is how they sell you.
Once they’re in, as far as they are concerned
They’re in.
Is your equipment enough? Why allow a company to place their equipment in your office if you already have working hardware?
Is it because they profit on the leasing you of their equipment rather than a finance program allowing to you to retain ownership of your network infrastructure upon their exit?
Or is it because their intention is to redesign your infrastructure over the course of the next few months making it impossible for you to operate it, as well allowing them the option to loom over your organization with the threat of shut down upon termination or exit?
Enough is enough.
How can an IT Service facility truly operate under the misguided assumption that they may continue to provide less then substandard services and continue to maintain your business? It’s simple because you can’t afford the time nor the effort to change it. If they promise a 30 minute response time and you get a two day response time, and it’s not management or the owner of the company, how many times does it have to happen before it even peaks the attention of the Managment Staff? More to the point, it sounds to me like you just bought into a service that for all intents and purposes, knows that they can get away with shooty workmanship, and knows that the likelihood of anyone doing anything about it is slim to none.
Does your current provider have a procedure in place for termination of services, or is it pretty much implied that you will never leave?
That's the Key.
Any properly organized and developed Service Agreement should be designed around the inevitable possibility of an organizations decision in both A. Migrate to an in-house from out-sourced IT servicing program and B. the possibility of changing to another method of IT servicing model (ie. Alternate Managed Services group). Without this form of protection organizations are subjecting themselves to the threat of not only excessive down times but to a wide spectrum of service fees, complications in changes and even worse loss of data. Can you afford your business being shut down for weeks while having to negotiate the surrender of your network or your email, or your data? Of course not, nor should it have too.
A tell-tale sign of an IT organizations intentions are easily identifiable in their service plan. Any IT plan lacking the ability of manageability by an internal staff member or alternate means servicing personnel is a set up. Plain and Simple
There is no need for a technological infrastructural configuration by which only one Managed Service Provider is capable of supporting. Nor should one agree to put the livelihood of the organization in which they operate in the hands of a salesman of IT services. I do agree that quarterly meetings are good times to touch base with corporate heads and ensure that everything IT is running smoothly, but these meetings should not be staging sessions for Managed Service Providers to offers more sales presentations . Setting a meeting is meant to be a quarterly report meeting reviewing wants and needs, not another opportunity to sell you something that you don’t need, and worse lead you down that path to locking you into the web of complication never allowing you to leave.Standardization is an excellent option for any form of services, but do not be fooled by negotiation tactics centered on shock and awe of elaborate promises and dazzling diagrams.The concept is not complicated.
IT Support is not Rocket Science
Yes, the requirements of network infrastructure can become lengthy and unique, but the concept is the same and relatively simple. Connectivity, Access to Email, Shared Resources.
There doesn’t need to be a lot of complexity in the development of a networking backbone as proclaimed by most. Management and maintenance is the key. If you lease your equipment of it is solely the property of a third party, your entire communications structure is reliant upon A) the reliability of this third party, and B) the survivability of the third party.
Case Study: Let’s say you sign with a Managed IT Services firm and agree to lease the outrageously priced but impressive network design they have proposed. Along with it you have chosen to pay a premium for IT support and a technology team promised to catapult you and your organization into the next generation of efficiency.
Now let’s say you receive sub-par service from your Support Team and only recommendations for new equipment (usually available for purchase from the MSP). You decide the IT Support quality is not worth the thousands of dollars you are paying a month so you decide it’s time to cancel your service and perhaps hire an in-house IT. Here’s the catch, not only will the Managed IT services firm claim you are obligated under contract to pay the fees, they will tell you that if you so do decide to cancel that they will be removing the equipment in which they installed and turning off whatever additional services they recommended and sold to you (ie. Hosted email, web integration, mobile management, mobile access, VPN, Antivirus, Spam filtering). Now you are left with a dilemma. Is it worth the cost leaving the MSP re-obtaining your freedom, or is it more cost effective to remain a hostage of your current Managed IT service provider servicing your needs when they get around to it.
So I say again, are you being held HOSTAGE by your Managed IT Services Provider?
EZ Worknet has a long standing reputation of designing and implementing infrastructural environments designed with you the consumer in mind. Our goal is to get you running and keep you running. We as well do offer the same services as these fly-by-night IT firms but our objective is quite a bit different. Not only will we work in tandem with your current IT, we will ensure that your network is just that YOUR NETWORK.
Proudly maintaining memberships with the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, The Better Business Bureau, Irvine Chamber of Commerce, Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, Riverside Chamber of Commerce, and holding memberships with multiple labor unions, having worked with a variety of Television and Radio Production (both pre and post), animations studios, fashion designers, and fashionistas worldwide we have dedicated our mission in providing premiere services designed in the interests of you and your needs. We are not here to profit on your loss, we do this because we love to make life simpler for both you and I.Providing one time setups, Setup and management, Support Services, Monitoring, Poject Itegration, Project Management, and yes we do Provide Management Services, but we don' lock you into them.
Feel free to check us out at www.EZWorknet.com or visit our store at www.EZWorkstore.com
