All questions › Working with Your MSP
Working with Your MSP
Response times, contact channels, onboarding, and the service standards to hold any provider to. 9 questions, answered in plain English.
- How fast should an MSP respond to a support request?Judge response by severity tiers: business-down emergencies should get near-immediate response; routine requests same-day. Get the commitments in writing, and ask what 'response' actually means: a human working the issue, not an auto-reply.
- Do I need on-site IT support, or is remote enough?Remote support resolves the large majority of day-to-day issues, but hardware failures, network buildouts, and some emergencies need hands on-site. The right answer is both, with on-site included rather than billed as a surprise.
- What should the first 90 days with a new MSP look like?Expect a structured sequence: full documentation of your environment, security baseline fixes, backup verification, and a visible drop in recurring issues. If the first months feel identical to the old provider, that's a warning sign.
- Can an MSP handle a complex network: hundreds of users, dozens of access points, multiple buildings?Yes: complexity is what managed tooling is built for. The right MSP manages multi-building networks through central controllers, documented topology, and monitoring that watches every switch and access point. Ask to see how they manage their largest current environment.
- Our servers and processes have to run 24/7. What happens when something fails at 2am or on a holiday?Monitoring never sleeps: a proper MSP's systems detect failures within minutes around the clock, and critical alerts page an on-call human. If you run genuinely 24/7 operations, get the after-hours escalation process in writing before you sign.
- What should happen, IT-wise, when we hire someone new or when someone leaves?Both should be checklists, not scrambles: a new hire's accounts, machine, and access ready on day one; a departure's access cut the same day, with email and files preserved and handed off. If either takes a week or gets forgotten, that is a process gap with real security cost.
- How many ways can I contact my MSP when I need help?You should have several: a ticket portal or support email for routine requests, and a phone number where a human answers for urgent ones. Most MSPs prefer tickets because they are tracked and triaged, which is fine, but if you cannot reach a person when the business is down, the ticket system does not matter.
- We're moving offices. How do we move our IT without chaos?Start earlier than feels necessary: the internet circuit is the long pole and can take 30 to 90 days to install at a new address. With that ordered, the rest is a sequence: survey the space, cable it, stage the network before moving day, then cut over on a weekend so Monday feels boring.
- We still run QuickBooks Desktop on a local network. Can an MSP support that?Yes. A good MSP will support QuickBooks Desktop for as long as your business needs it: the local server or host machine, multi-user networking, updates, and tested backups of the company file. That said, Intuit is clearly steering customers toward QuickBooks Online, and we recommend moving when it fits your business.
Want a straight answer about your setup?
Asheville Computer Company is a local managed IT provider based in Arden, minutes from most of Asheville.
Call (828) 290-9092 or visit ashevillecomputercompany.com for a free, no-pressure consultation.