For small and medium-sized businesses in the financial sector, creating an IT team with an extensive skill set that covers everything from cybersecurity to compliance, etc. can be expensive and time-consuming. It is therefore not unusual for these businesses to outsource IT services to managed service providers.

As a small and medium-sized business in the financial sector, choosing the right managed IT service provider is one of the most impactful decisions a business can make. Making the right choice minimises security risks, streamlines operations and reduces deployment time for critical IT projects.

But how can businesses in the financial sector choose the right managed IT service provider? What factors must be considered? Can it be assumed that size means dependability and quality, and years in operation guarantees proven processes and stability?

Understanding your business requirements

Understanding your business IT requirements is the first step in choosing the right managed service IT provider. You need to understand where your business is with respect to IT and where your business wants to be within three years. More importantly, you need to decide how much investment in IT the business can afford to make in the long and short terms.

Having clarity of purpose as to what your business needs and your budget helps set expectations and ensures that you can sieve through options to quickly arrive at the best solution for your business.  

5 tips to consider when choosing a managed IT service provider

In choosing the right managed IT provider, some important points to consider include:

• Expertise
• Price
• Industry-specific experience
• Scalability and flexibility
• Security

Expertise

Knowing the capabilities of your potential service provider helps determine if they are the right fit for your business or if you need to explore other options. Important questions that should be asked include:

• Are your solutions ISO 27001 and FCA compliant?
• Where are your datacentres based?
• How many clients do you have?
• Where is your helpdesk based?
• What certifications do you possess?
• How many engineers do you have?
• What are your response times?

Their responses will give you an indication of their expertise, and allow you weigh your requirements against the service they provide.

Price

Your budget is arguably one of the most important factors to consider when choosing an IT provider. Except you have an unlimited budget, pricing will most likely influence your choice of an IT provider. Having a pricing structure ensures that there are no surprises, and you are not overcharged.

It is vital to note that an expensive managed service provider may not be a good fit. The ideal partnership would fall within your budget while ticking all your requirements.

Industry-specific experience

While a potential managed service provider can have an impressive list of client references, verifying that they have industry-specific experience ensures that they understand your challenges, compliance requirements and business processes.

Also, consider their certifications. Becoming a Microsoft Partner, for example, shows that a business has a strong commitment to client delivery and staff training.

Scalability and flexibility

As your business grows, you will need an IT provider that can grow with your business. Working with an IT partner with a scalable solution ensures that you can rest easy knowing that they give you support based on your business and are a future-proof choice.

Also consider whether the potential IT provider have flexible offerings that allows you to pay for only the services you need, and whether they offer both remote and in-office services.

Security

With the increase in cybercrimes, managed IT service providers have become prime targets for cybercriminals looking to scale their attacks. The last thing any business needs is to suffer a breach through an IT service provider meant to protect your business. Seek information about their internal security practices, processes they adopt to prevent cyberattacks, regulatory oversight, how they manage data privacy and vendor management practices.

Tivarri is both ISO 27001 (the main information security standard) and Cyber Essentials certified. Our solutions are configured to ensure that your critical data is protected against both internal and external threats. We deploy a variety of cybersecurity services including multi-factor authentication, mobile device management, etc, to keep your business safe.

As a business, we subject ourselves to stringent cybersecurity requirements by following best practices of ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials. We have 32 internal policies including an access control policy, remote access and mobile computing policy, laptop policy, leaving policy, password policy, clear desk policy, data protection policy, amongst others.

Contact us today for a no-obligation review of your requirements and a demonstration of the advantages of our solutions.