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The First 30 Days With a New IT Provider: What You Should Have in Hand

The First 30 Days With a New IT Provider: What You Should Have in Hand

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by

dtrainum
in

Briefing

Most small offices judge a new IT provider by how the first month feels. A better test is what you can hold at the end of it. Good onboarding produces documents and evidence, not just installed software.

For a small office, about 30 days is a reasonable window to inventory devices and accounts, roll out monitoring and endpoint protection, close the biggest security gaps and write down how everything fits together. Larger or multi-site offices take longer, but the deliverables are the same.

If the month ends without these items, the provider may still be capable, but you are taking their word for it. The point of the list is to stop taking anyone's word for it, including ours.

What to do

  1. A device inventory with owner, age, warranty and patch status for every computer and server.
  2. An account list for email, line-of-business apps and admin accounts, with MFA status for each.
  3. Break-glass admin logins for your email tenant, domain registrar and firewall, held by you.
  4. Backup coverage list and the result of at least one restore test, with the time it took.
  5. A network diagram and the location of every firewall, switch and access point.
  6. A ranked findings list: what is still risky and what the plan is.
  7. Your first monthly report and access to the client portal.

How to verify

  • Pick a random laptop and find it in the inventory.
  • Ask for every account without MFA. The answer should be none, or a written exception.
  • Log in with your break-glass account yourself, once, to prove it works.

Sources

Want help putting this in place? Contact Computer Plus or compare our plans.