Outsourcing IT management as an SME: the questions to ask before you sign

Anyone looking to outsource IT management hears the same promises from every provider: proactive management, a fixed price and fast support. What that means in practice is rarely spelled out. In this guide we answer the questions we hear most often in introductory meetings, each time with the arrangements Xylos uses in its own contracts. That gives you a yardstick to compare providers side by side.

Outsourcing IT management means that an external partner, a managed service provider or MSP, takes over the day-to-day management, support and security of your IT environment. You usually pay a fixed monthly fee for it. The partner monitors your environment continuously and steps in before your users are affected.

At Xylos we call this Managed Services. Today we manage the IT of 250 customers this way.

Outsourcing pays off once your IT environment lacks an overview and management is mostly reactive. You notice it in tickets that sit unanswered, invoices that differ every month and an environment nobody keeps an eye on outside office hours.

The more your business relies on servers, cloud and Microsoft 365, and the stricter the security requirements become, partly because of NIS2, the more different specialisms management requires. A managed service provider brings those specialists together in one team.

Managed Services for SMEs is built for mid-sized companies. For larger organisations, Xylos has a separate approach: Managed Services for enterprise. That way Xylos offers a solution for both mid-sized and large companies.

A fixed monthly fee makes your IT costs predictable, provided you know what it covers. Providers differ widely here. Some charge per ticket or per hour once you exceed a certain volume, others bill advice or travel separately.

At Xylos, the fixed fee covers:

• all incidents and questions from your employees, however long they take to resolve

• updates, patches and security maintenance of your environment

• 24/7 monitoring and support of your back-end infrastructure, such as servers and network

• follow-up of your backups and all restore requests

• secure password management for the accounts we use in your environment

• OASE licences for your employees, so they get more out of Microsoft 365 through short videos and learning paths

• a monthly ticket report, a meeting every two months and an annual vision meeting

Not covered by the fixed fee are hardware, your suppliers' contracts and support costs, and any improvement projects you have carried out. We can optionally include spare parts for your environment once we have taken a full inventory.

On top of that management, you choose which services to add, such as a SOC that monitors your environment for threats 24/7 or a technical profile who comes on site at set times. Every service is also available separately and on demand, without a full management contract.

The price depends on the size of your environment and the services you choose. At Xylos, after the audit of your environment, you receive a proposal with a tailored fixed monthly fee. That fee stays the same, however many questions or incidents there are that month.

Ask every provider what the fee covers and compare quotes on the same scope. A low monthly price with many exceptions quickly costs you more over a year than an all-in fee that looks higher on paper.

Always ask for two figures: how quickly they respond and how quickly the problem is solved. A fast first reaction without a solution does not get you far. Also ask what happens outside office hours.

At Xylos, every ticket gets a priority based on impact and urgency, with its own response and resolution time set out in your contract. If a critical incident brings down your servers or network, we respond 24/7: the monitoring automatically calls out an on-call engineer. Every two months, your report shows what share of your tickets stayed within the agreed times.

Every provider calls itself proactive. You only hear the difference when you dig deeper: who monitors your environment at night, how are updates planned and when is an incident truly resolved?

Xylos monitors at three levels. The first checks whether every component is available, the second tracks the performance of critical components and the third goes deeper into specific applications. You also get your own dashboard showing the status of your environment.

All customer environments come together in one cockpit, where our monitoring follows them on a single screen. When the monitoring detects an incident, it automatically calls an engineer, at night and at weekends too. That is how we stand behind your back-end infrastructure, such as servers and network, 24/7.

We roll out updates in waves. Less critical systems go first, the most critical ones last, and systems that depend on each other share the same wave. That keeps disruption to your business as small as possible. When many similar tickets come in, we look for the common cause. We only close an incident once there is a real solution.

A management partner gets the keys to your IT. So ask how that access is secured and monitored.

At Xylos, all management accounts run through a secure password vault. Passwords change every 30 days, so a consultant who leaves the company no longer has access. Every session in your environment is recorded and you get a full overview of who had access, when and why.

If you also want your security alerts followed up 24/7, you add the SOC that Xylos offers together with Eye Security. That SOC detects threats on your devices and in Microsoft 365 and steps in immediately. If your company falls under NIS2, that follow-up helps you report an incident within 24 hours. Read more in our guide to NIS2 in Belgium.

Switching to Xylos happens in three steps. First, we map your entire environment with an audit. Next, you receive recommendations to make your environment faster, more secure or more innovative, and those are optional. Finally, we ensure a smooth transition from your current partner to Xylos.

The transition itself takes about eight weeks. At the start, you provide the existing documentation, access rights and a list of your users. We run a health check on everything covered by the contract, update the documentation, install our monitoring and set up the ticketing platform.

After a kick-off with your team, we introduce the service to your employees. From week five, the agreed response times apply, and around week seven the first service meeting takes place. In week eight we complete the takeover together.

Xylos works without vendor lock-in. All documentation of your environment sits in a shared customer environment that you can access yourself.

Improvement projects are optional. Xylos takes over your environment as it is today and carries full responsibility from day one, even if you have not changed anything yet.

After the audit, you do receive recommendations to make your environment faster, more secure or more innovative. Typical proposals are a fixed patch cycle, workplace management with Microsoft Intune and agreements on how much data you can afford to lose and how quickly systems must be back after an outage. Each project first gets a budget estimate and then a detailed quote. You choose which projects you do and when.

Ask which figures you receive and how often you discuss them together. At Xylos, you get a ticket report every month and meet your dedicated contact every two months. Among other things, you discuss:

• the share of tickets handled within the agreed times

• the average response and resolution time

• how many questions were solved at first contact

• open tickets and how long they have been open

• the satisfaction of your users

If the service falls short of the agreed standards, an improvement plan follows. Once a year, you sit down for a vision meeting with technical specialists and a member of Xylos management. You receive a report with the trends relevant to you and the upcoming investments, with their expected return.

For an SME, the personal relationship matters a great deal. Ask whether you work with a dedicated team that knows your environment, and who looks beyond the ticket.

At Xylos, you have one dedicated point of contact who knows your environment, follows up your contract and proactively suggests improvements. The service desk is based in Antwerp, on the Noorderlaan, and Xylos also has an office in Herentals. Most management happens remotely, but we regularly come on site too. If you want someone in-house at set times, you can schedule a technical profile for a fixed day each week.

• Does the partner map your environment before making a proposal?

• What does the fixed monthly fee cover, and what falls outside it?

• Which services are included as standard, and which can you add as options?

• Which response and resolution times apply, also outside office hours?

• Who monitors your environment at night, and who follows up security alerts?

• How does the partner secure its access to your environment?

• How long does the switch take, and do you have to invest first?

• Can you switch freely later, or are you tied to the partner's environment?

• Which figures do you receive, and how often do you discuss them?

Schedule a no-obligation introductory meeting. We listen first and tell you honestly where we can and cannot help you. Read more about our approach on the Managed Services for SMEs page.