With the ever-growing opportunity to reduce costs through outsourcing, using 3rd party teams to perform your IT functions become a choice that can dramatically save you on operational costs. However, choosing an IT support company that can support your needs can be a tricky task. There are numerous IT services companies in Dubai, with a wide-ranging difference in cost and quality. So how do you ensure your IT support company is up to the job? These three checkpoints will allow you to best asses the vehicle that will support your business goals.

Staff

A company is only as good as its staff. The ability of the personnel of your IT team will dictate the direction of your IT functions. You need to qualify the team that will be supporting your requirements to ensure that they can deliver.

It is important to ask your IT services company in Dubai to provide detailed profiles of a typical team, or the actual team, that will be supporting you.

Things to look for here are:

  • The number of years of local experience – Dubai has nuances, like any city, and their ability to understand these is important
  • Personnel structure – you will typically see three levels here; onsite support, helpdesk and senior
  • The certifications achieved at each level – Microsoft certifications are a good benchmark as they require an academic level of understanding along with the ability to physically prove that you can perform certain tasks. Also look for certifications they hold in the systems that they use to support you
  • Other clients they have worked with – ideally in fields close to yours, as they will understand problems that you may be experiencing and how best to fix them

If your support provider gives a good impression at this level then you are on the right route to selecting the best for your company.

Systems

One of the benefits of employing an outsourced IT provider is that they have the opportunity to provide IT support software that would usually be way outside of the budget of a single SME. Because this team will serve a number of clients they can spread the cost across the clients to make it more affordable for all.

It is imperative that you question your future IT team about the systems that they use. This can be the metric that separates what is known in the industry as a managed services provider rather than a simple break/fix merchant.

Things to look for:

These are just some of the core functions, amongst many, that a managed services software can provide. A good IT services company will be able to demonstrate each of the above ability and more.

Policies and procedures

If your team has good staff and the systems to support them, you must look for one more important trait. Their ability to apply policies and procedures to your company.

A lot of the IT issues suffered by businesses come back to the policies of the company and how they are applied to the staff. For instance, if you allow your PCs to be able to connect to peer to peer sites, you are likely to download viruses and open your company to legal issues. These would come back to the Managing Director of the company as well as the employee. This is a simple example, the policies employed through a business will be defined by your services company and you. In this way, you will build a policy system that will support your company culture, whilst increasing your productivity.

By employing robust policies for the usage of your systems, you will remove potential threats and will be able to build a sustainable IT infrastructure that will empower your employees.

The procedures that your IT company employs will also convey their ability to support you. These will be typically defined by their Service Level Agreement (or SLA). This is a co-signed document that demonstrates what actions occur, with what timing against pre-defined risks or outages. The best IT support teams will be able to show you how this looks and how it has been applied to companies similar to yours.

By checking in on these 3 traits, you will be in a position to qualify your IT support company in Dubai. Remember, often companies can talk the talk, but can they walk the walk. Getting them to demonstrate past or live examples should give good evidence of their ability to help you succeed in your IT and business goals.