Choosing an IT solutions provider in Dubai can seem an unsurmountable task. The options are plentiful and picking the correct company for your business is indeed tricky. By reviewing the following 5 qualities you will be able to align your business to the best supplier for your needs.
Relevant experience
In terms of experience, many IT suppliers will not hesitate to give you a long list of logos for you to familiarize yourself with. However, the services provided and actual business relationship is not clearly seen.
The best IT service providers will be able to give you their clients, what work they have done for them, the length of time they have worked together and a reference for you to check with. It is important to go to these lengths to ensure you are getting the correct information.
Along with the accuracy of the information comes the business relevance. If you are a 20 person company and the IT provider only has worked with Fortune 500 companies, you may be misaligned. The chances are that the service you want will not match the service they offer. A better approach is to understand your business goals (with respect to IT) and to ask your provider for examples of how they have provided these solutions to companies of similar stature.
SLAs (Service Level Agreements)
When employing a solution provider, it is vital that you understand the processes that this team uses. This is normally documented in the form of an SLA. This agreement allows the company to dictate the service it will offer and to what standards the service will be delivered.
The best examples will give you a full breakdown of all of the possible eventualities and the actions and response times against these. These should also be categorized into the affect that they have on your business. For instance, a complete failure of systems would be given a category of Business Critical and therefore must be addressed with utmost importance.
Preventative maintenance systems
They say that prevention is better than cure. In IT, this statement is more relevant than most. Even if you take the example of data loss, these outages can have an enormous detrimental effect on a business, the focus is more on saving your business than the cost.
The most effective IT companies employ a preventative maintenance approach. This is the act of working to prevent occurrences rather than just fixing them when they happen. Often, specialist software is used to give these suppliers an added advantage.
Check with your proposed supplier that they employ this approach and have the systems to support it. This could be the difference between running a successful business and having a business at all!
Reporting
One crucial part of an IT supplier’s service should be its reporting. Only on successful review of activities can a business’ current and future needs be assessed. Check with your supplier, what reporting and analysis they provide, how this is created and the frequency of this activity. A good service provider should be meeting and discussing with you at least once a month.
Advice
A follow on from the reporting activity is the company’s ability and structure when giving advice. After all, only with the best advice will your company flourish within the IT world.
One of the benefits of employing a service provider, rather than in-house, is the strength in depth. The best IT solution providers will have a plethora of staff, at varying levels of expertise. Make sure that your provider not only gives you access to the best employees but has a process in place with the advice that they give.
By using the 5 qualities above and by quantifying your provider’s ability against these, you should be in place to make an informed decision about your IT future.
