This post is the last in a series about budgeting for IT costs. Previous topics include budgeting for equipment and budgeting for people and growth.
Putting together the right support model depends on what you need out of your IT company. Here are some key questions to ask yourself:
After you know the answers to these questions picking a support model becomes less daunting. The following billing models are pretty standard in most IT companies and work well for small and midsize businesses, depending on the level of support you need.
This is the model you want if you don’t want to do anything. Essentially, you're asking your IT company to handle everything related to IT. Typically this is done for a flat, predictable fee based on the number of assets in your environment or number of employees.
These service typically includes:
Generally, the only item All You Can Eat plans don't include is large IT projects like an email migration or a custom SharePoint site. This will vary by company.
This is a good compromise if you don’t want to have a full All You Can Eat mModel but don’t want to just sit around and wait for things to break. In a Monitoring Only style agreement, your IT company will monitor your environment and work to keep things running proactively. For example, they may monitor your backups and if a backup fails, they will remote into your environment and fix it.
If you enter this type of agreement, be sure it's very clearly defined what type of work is covered under the agreement and what work is out of scope. If you're not on the same page with your IT company about what's being monitored, you could have an outage you don't know about.
This is the model you want if you want to take on some responsibility for support but would like to have your IT company on retainer to help get you out of a jam. Most IT companies will sell you a block of hours to be used in a certain period (like 10 hours a month). In return for you committing to a certain number of hours, the solution provider will typically offer a reduced hourly rate.
This is the model you want if you want to take full responsibility. But beware of this model – very few (good) solution providers have a room of help desk engineers just waiting on the phone to ring.
While this model may seem cheaper up front, typically you're only going to call when you are in a real jam (like a failed hard drive with no backup or ransomware), so be prepared for a rather large bill. You should always ask for an estimate before work begins and ask the company to get approval before going over the initial estimate.
Pay as You Go models also typically mean slower service. Good IT companies have service level agreements (SLAs) defining how quickly they will start working on your issue for their customers on higher level plans. These don't always apply to Pay as You Go customers, though. If you call in with an issue, you may be in the queue behind several other customers, which could be difficult if it's an urgent issue.
These are the most common types of support agreements we see today. There will, of course, be small nuances between how each company packages their services. As you're working through the model that best suits your business, here are a few questions you should consider asking your solution provider:
If you aren’t sure where to start – here is what we tell most new customers. A well-managed IT environment typically takes between .5 and 1.5 hours per user to manage and maintain.
Using that as a rule of thumb, you can come to a pretty quick conclusion on which model makes the most financial sense. A 40-person firm who relies heavily on IT will generally come out ahead in an All You Can Eat model. A 5-person start-up, however, would generally be best served with a block of time.
Bottom line – there is no perfect science, but by asking the right questions and assessing your needs, you should be able to land on a model that works for you and your team. Of course, we are here to help if you would like a second opinion!