Choosing a Managed IT Provider on the Peninsula
Every provider's website promises fast response and proactive monitoring. Those claims are free to make. These four questions are not, and one of them only matters on this side of the water.
Most businesses pick an IT provider on price and gut feel, then find out where the differences are eighteen months later during an outage.
Four questions up front will tell you more than any capability matrix.
Ask who picks up the phone
"24/7 support" covers a lot of ground. It might mean a dedicated on-call engineer, or it might mean an answering service that logs your problem until Monday.
Ask what actually happens at 7pm on a Friday, who specifically responds, and whether that person can reach your documentation.
Then separate response time from resolution time. They're different numbers and providers quote whichever one flatters them, so get both, and ask what each looks like for a total outage versus one user with a broken printer.
Ask where their technicians actually sit
Remote support handles most tickets, but it won't handle a failed switch, a dead firewall, or a new office fit-out.
Geography here is unforgiving. A provider in Seattle or Bellevue reaches Port Orchard by ferry, or by driving the long way through Tacoma, and you're paying for that time either way. "Same day" quietly becomes "tomorrow morning."
So ask directly. Where are your technicians based? How is travel billed? What does onsite response look like for Bremerton versus Belfair versus Gig Harbor?
Ferry schedules and bridge traffic should show up somewhere in the answer. If they don't, the provider hasn't thought about it, and you'll be the one finding the gap during an outage.
Ask what happens when you leave
Nobody enjoys this conversation, which is exactly why it's useful. A confident provider answers plainly: your data and documentation are yours, here's the handover process, here's the notice period.
Watch for administrator accounts held only by the provider, licenses bought under their tenant instead of yours, and vague answers about who owns the documentation.
Ask how they price growth
Per-user pricing is easy to compare and easy to game. Find out what counts as a user, whether shared devices are billed, what sits outside the flat rate, and what a project costs versus routine support.
You're not looking for the lowest number. You're looking for one you can predict as you hire.
One more thing
Ask every provider the same four questions and write the answers down.
The point isn't to catch anyone out. It's to compare like with like at a moment when nothing is on fire and everyone is being straight with you, which is much harder to arrange later.
Want straight answers to all four about us? Book a call, or see what our clients say. For how we think about the technical side, we've written up MFA rollouts and the signs a network is holding a business back.