Most organizations don’t seriously evaluate their IT provider until the contract is nearly up. That’s the worst possible time to do it. You end up comparing options against a deadline, with no leverage left on exit terms and no real room to check references, so the decision gets made on price and gut feel instead of on evidence.
The video above covers six things worth checking well before that point: how your support actually gets delivered, whether security work happens before incidents or only after them, whether anyone is building you a roadmap, how much visibility you have into your own environment, whether your provider will tell you something you don’t want to hear, and how they handle the expertise they don’t have in house. Some of it applies whether you are on a fully managed agreement or splitting the work through co-managed IT.
Knowing what to look for is the first step. Scoring providers against each other, running the reference calls that actually tell you something, and understanding what a transition involves before you commit to one is where most evaluations stall.
