How do you change IT support provider without breaking everything?

Start with your contract, not with the new provider. Find the notice period and the renewal date, because those two facts decide your timetable and nothing else does.

Then check three things you may have assumed were yours: your Microsoft 365 tenant, your domain name, and your backups. If your provider holds any of them in their own name rather than yours, sort that out before you tell anybody you are leaving.

Everything after that is logistics.

What do you actually need to get hold of?

Write this list down and work through it. A reasonable outgoing provider will hand it over without much fuss, because they have to.

• Global administrator access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, in an account that belongs to you.
• Your domain name. Log into the registrar yourself. If you cannot, find out whose name it is registered in. This is the single most common nasty surprise.
• DNS control, which may be at the registrar or somewhere else entirely.
• Firewall and router admin credentials, and the licence or support contract details behind them.
• Backup consoles and the backups themselves, with confirmation of what is actually being backed up and how far back it goes.
• Licence ownership. Which subscriptions are in your name, and which sit under the provider’s agreement with the vendor.
• Documentation. Network diagrams, asset lists, anything describing how the place is put together. You will often be told this does not exist, which is itself informative.
• Any certificates, and anything with an expiry date on it.

Ask for it in writing, in one email, with a date on it.

What does a proper handover look like?

Boring, in the good sense.

The new provider audits what is there before changing anything, which usually takes a few days and turns up things nobody knew about. Their tools go on, so monitoring and security are live from day one rather than starting when the old provider’s stop. Access is transferred in a planned order rather than being switched off in a hurry. The old provider’s remote access comes out last, once everything else is confirmed working.

Nobody should be asking your staff to do anything on the day. What happens in your first 90 days with us walks through ours, from the first day to the 90 day review.

What do we find when we take one over?

Every single time, something. It happens to any environment that has been running for years while everybody was busy, whoever was looking after it.

The list that comes up most: external sharing links created for a one off job years ago and still live, accounts belonging to people who left the business, far more global administrators than anybody intended, no consistent licensing, disk encryption switched off, and multi factor authentication either patchy or entirely absent.

On one network we found a scheduled task on the domain controller that had been running every ten minutes since 2019, trying to fetch code from an address linked to a cryptomining botnet. Six years. There was antivirus installed and it scanned every day. Nobody was reading what it found. The only reason nothing had happened was that the attacker’s own web address had gone offline at some point in the intervening years, which means they were saved by somebody else’s bad infrastructure rather than by anything on the defending side.

Some businesses will find that list and charge you to fix it. We take the view that we would rather your environment was secure than have an argument about who broke it, so we get on with it as part of onboarding.

How do you know it is time to change?

Most people put up with these for years:

• A different person every time, and you have to explain your setup again each time.
• Tickets go in and nothing comes back. No name, no acknowledgement, no idea if anyone read it.
• You cannot predict the bill, so nobody rings unless something is properly on fire.
• The answer to friction is always that you are holding it wrong. We moved a client off a virtual desktop setup they had been sold and could not use properly. Their previous provider’s position was that browsing SharePoint in a web browser was better and the staff should get used to it. It was not better. They hated it, they were slower, and every conversation ended with "our way is correct". We put them back on their own laptops with files working the way people expect files to work, and took a monthly line off their invoice while we were at it.
• Things get recommended that nobody can explain the purpose of.

If your provider’s answer to a problem is consistently that the problem is you, get a second opinion. Sometimes removing something rather than adding it is the answer, and sometimes a thing was sold because of the margin on it rather than because you needed it.

How long does it take to switch IT provider?

Give yourself six weeks if you can. Two to gather the list above and give notice, two for the audit and the tools going on, two of overlap where both providers still have access and nothing has been switched off in a hurry.

If you are already out of contract, it can be done a good deal faster. If you are mid term, the overlap is the bit worth paying for.

What to do next

Find the contract and the notice period. Log into your domain registrar. Check whose name your Microsoft tenant is in. That is an hour of work and it tells you almost everything about how easy or awkward this is going to be.

Then talk to us and we will tell you straight what we would find and what we would do first, whether or not you switch. What we cover and what it costs are both published, so you can compare before you speak to anybody.