The first three months with a managed IT provider are where you find out what you actually bought. Good providers follow a sequence that looks roughly like the one below. If yours skipped most of it, that's worth a direct conversation, whether "yours" is us or anyone else.
Month one: find out what exists
- The audit. Every device, server, license, account, and vendor gets inventoried. You should end month one with an asset list you've never had before, including the forgotten server under the stairs. Especially the forgotten server under the stairs.
- Credential collection. Admin passwords, domain registrar, DNS, ISP account, software licenses, all gathered into a proper password manager, with you holding emergency access. If your provider becomes the only party who can log into your own systems, you've traded a risk for a hostage situation. See what leaving looks like for why this matters on day one, not day last.
- Agent rollout. Monitoring software goes on every machine, quietly building the picture: disk health, patch status, aging hardware, that one PC still running an OS from two presidents ago.
Month two: stop the bleeding
- Patching catch-up. Most new environments arrive months behind on updates. Expect a burst of scheduled restarts, then silence as automated patching takes over.
- Backup verification. Not "backups are configured." An actual restore test, with a result someone shows you. A surprising fraction of new clients arrive with backups that have been quietly failing for months. This is the single highest-value thing a new provider does.
- Security floor. MFA on email and admin accounts, endpoint protection deployed, obvious holes closed. The fancy stuff can wait. The floor can't.
Month three: make it durable
- Documentation. Network map, credentials, vendor list, and runbooks, written down where you can see them. Documentation is the difference between a provider and a dependency.
- The baseline report. A plain-English summary: what they found, what they fixed, what they recommend next year, roughly what it costs. This becomes the yardstick every future quarter gets measured against.
- Rhythm. Ticket flow is settled, response times are observable, and you can compare reality against the SLA you signed.
Red flags by day 90
No asset inventory you can look at. No restore test you've seen evidence of. Credentials still scattered, or worse, held only by them. Every conversation is an upsell. Any one of these is a bad sign. Two or more means the audit they skipped is the audit their replacement will run. The offboarding you'd face is covered in switching providers without getting burned.
Want this handled instead of homeworked? That's the job.
Email us →