Choosing the wrong IT provider is a costly mistake!

There are literally hundreds of IT support companies in Australia fighting for your business. They all promise to deliver the best IT support, offer the best cybersecurity, and all for a small monthly fee. Free services are also being offered to entice customers to come onboard. How could you loose?! Unfortunately, this is where things tend to fall apart.

Exigence is being consulted daily, primarily in the Managed IT and Security Services domains. We meet many organisations who are dissatisfied with the level of service and expertise offered by their current provider. In simple terms, this translates into poorly set up and configured cloud systems (including O365), insufficient IT security, disparate cloud services, and lack of prompt IT support. These organisations are suffering, which ends up costing them time and money.

In the world of managed IT service providers, the competition is fierce. The recurring revenue that supports our very existence is always under attack from overzealous vendors or other MSP's that promise to offer better service for less. The truth of the matter is that it costs money to offer expertise. It costs even more money to hire the best of breed IT engineers and cybersecurity specialists. If you are feeling sick and need specialist medical help, do you choose your doctor based on the cheapest rate, or do you engage the best specialist for the job? IT is no different. You should choose your provider based on outcome, not cost.

Exigence has never been touted as the cheapest MSP out there. Nevertheless, we are still competitive with our prices when you take into consideration what we offer as subject matter experts. The level of expertise available to you, our customer, is so important. We are truly masters of our trade. We employ the smartest engineers in the industry who know how to resolve IT issues promptly and with minimum disruptions.

• We manage our projects using proven methodologies.
• We offer accountability and a full audit trail.
• We exercise change management.
• We guarantee satisfaction.

Vertical vs Horizontal

It is not common for a Managed IT Services Provider to specialise in only a single vertical market. In fact, the "horizontal" model is mainstream. After all, by narrowing down your client base to only one specific industry, one reduces the potential client base. However, the Biotechnology, Pharma and Health sector is different. Supporting clients from this vertical requires an in depth understanding of unique requirements of this vertical: Regulatory Compliance, FDA/TGA guidelines, SOX and other financial controls, GxP (GlP, GMP, etc.), qualification, validation, IP protection and many other jargon words I would rather not mention in this article. But whatever the requirement might be, if it's our vertical then we will have the depth of knowledge to support it.

All clients are cost conscious

Being cost-conscious doesn’t always mean getting things for a rock-bottom price. When it comes to IT, it means getting the most out of resources you have already committed. A perfect example is Office 365. The Office 365 environment is vast and ever expanding. Many organisations that sign up for a simple email service do not realise the extensive services and applications that Microsoft make available at their disposal. Most at no additional cost. Companies continue to maintain redundant cloud services (like Dropbox) without realising that SharePoint online can do the same and more… (and you are already paying for it). Zoom vs Teams, Dropbox vs SharePoint, Azure vs AWS, etc. A specialist services company like Exigence can review and validate your existing cloud stack. Our expertise will not only save you on operational costs but improve security and collaboration by consolidating your cloud services and applications.

Take your time and learn the strength and weakness of your current IT services provider. Don’t be afraid to ask direct questions, ask them to demonstrate their cloud expertise, their past cloud-migration use-cases and their staff training commitments.  IT technology has moved in leaps and bounds over the past five years. Exigence has a dedicated staff-training program to ensure that you, our customer, get the best possible experts working for you. Maintaining status-quo when it comes to IT knowledge isn’t an option. Maintaining status-quo when it comes to cyber-security is outright dangerous.