Switching IT Providers? Why onboarding is the most critical step

Outsourcing your IT to a new provider is a big decision. Whether you're looking for a better service, stronger security, or more strategic support, the onboarding process is where it all begins and usually your first time working together after being promised the world—and it’s where things can go very right or very wrong.

A proper IT onboarding isn’t just a handover of passwords that are written down and which users to ‘look out for’. It’s a deep dive into your IT infrastructure, your risks, and your goals, getting to know the people in it and their IT skill levels. It’s where your new provider proves they understand your business, show’s if they care about it and usually where hidden issues come to light.

Here’s why we have found our strong onboarding skills are useful, and also what they have uncovered..

Security starts on day one A thorough onboarding helps uncover any vulnerabilities that may have gone unnoticed, sometimes for years.

We take our time and go through our checklists to ensure your systems are safe, the gates all locked and you’re protected, your data is backed up, and your compliance boxes are ticked. We deploy all endpoint protection as soon as we have access, these do a full disk scan so we know we’re starting from a strong position and you’re safe. This would also be the time we setup any backups if required, and configure our email security systems.

Faster time to stability We take the time to understand your environment and do full documentation and fill our internal IT systems with all the information we need to support you, and so we can implement solutions faster and more effectively. That means less downtime, fewer surprises, and a smoother transition.

It also means when you call up, we are so much closer to the solution because we have documented everything to our standard.

Better Client Experience A well-run onboarding shows professionalism, attention to detail, and genuine care. It builds trust and sets the tone for a long-term partnership. We always send out a welcome email to all staff, often we will either be on-site on the day of contract go live to put names to faces and install our remote tools – or if the users are remote, we will have a welcome Teams video chat so we can all get to know one another. It shouldn’t be a worry to reach out and get IT support and putting a name to a face always starts a new relationship off well.

Proactive Support, Not Just Firefighting We’re all about being proactive rather than reactive. During onboarding we will install our remote management tools, and along with the documentation - this gives us the ability to monitor any key infrastructure and we will be alerted of any issues, usually before you even know there’s a problem. This really sets us out from competitors – often we will call customers to tell them we’ve spotted a potential problem and we’re already working on it, before they even know so we can keep their uptime at 100%.

Real Stories: Why Discovery Matters

As part of every new contract, we conduct a thorough onboarding and discovery session as we mentioned above. We ask a lot of questions—sometimes the same ones in different ways—to ensure we (and the customer) fully understand their IT environment. Usually over a coffee and doughnut. And more often than not – we discover a gap, or something the customer assumes they had – but they was never informed about.

Customer 1: The Missing Backup We recently onboarded a business with 2 x physical on-site servers running three virtual machines. The previous IT provider backed up two of them, and the third—containing their main database—was supposedly backed up by the software vendor.

After a quick call with the software vendor to introduce ourselves as the new IT provider, we discovered a critical oversight: the vendor only backs up data for their cloud customers. This client was on-premise. No backups had been made for their main database server….for three years.

We jumped on this and that night, we ran a full server backup and secured it off-site. Now, everyone can sleep a little easier.

Customer 2: The Invisible Protection Another customer claimed to have antivirus protection, paid for until the end of the year from their previous IT provider. As part of our onboarding, we planned to replace it with our tried and tested endpoint MDR protection solution. But when we checked, there was no antivirus installed—anywhere. Even more concerning, their local firewalls were disabled.

We re-enabled the firewalls, deployed our MDR solution, and asked them to leave systems on overnight for a full scan. That night, our 24/7 SOC team detected a crypto mining service running on their server. We removed it, cleaned up the system, and notified the MD—who was understandably shocked, but relieved it had all been dealt with.

💡 Final Thoughts

If you're outsourcing your IT, don’t be afraid to ask your provider, or IT manager the tough questions:

• Are we backed up? How?

• Are we protected? How?

• Are we compliant? How?
  

A good IT provider will be proud to show off their green ticks, their tools they run, and the secure systems they’ve built. And if they’re not? It might be time to ask why.

#ITSupport #ManagedIT #ITProvider