We are a professional services firm with around 60 users. We had been with our IT support provider for just over 12 years and weren’t particularly happy with the service they provided, but most of the time things weren’t bad enough to prompt a change.
Issues would flare up from time to time – sometimes they were technical issues and sometimes they were customer services issues, including slow responses to tickets. In most circumstances, these issues were somewhat resolved and life just carried on as normal.
We had accepted this barely adequate service as we saw moving to a new provider as a hassle that we didn’t want. There was also a loyalty factor in that we had been with the company for quite some time and they had seen us through many IT changes.
In May 2019 I happened to be speaking to someone that ran a company with a similar culture to ours and he mentioned that they had just swapped IT support providers, to Datek Solutions. He told me how fantastic the new service was and how he wished that they had done it years ago.
Over the next six months or so, Datek called me a few times, just to touch base and see how things were going. There was certainly no ‘hard selling’ going on.
Towards the end of 2019 we decided that we wanted to achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation. We went through the process but, to our surprise, failed due to the insufficient security of our IT.
I called Datek and explained what had happened. They said that they had recently helped another one of their customers achieve Cyber Essentials so were familiar with the process and requirements. We agreed that Datek would do a full audit of our IT system. This experience was a massive eye-opener.
Some of the issues we found on that session were:
- Some servers had not been rebooted for hundreds of days, which means they hadn’t been patched and were missing several critical updates.
- The password for our firewall was the generic “admin” password that they are all shipped with.
- Several users had not been set up properly, and they had far more permissions than needed.
- One of the hard drives in our server was faulty.
- The cloud backup service was not working and there hadn’t been a successful cloud backup done for 9 months!
- A lot of our infrastructure hardware was out of warranty.
There were many other issues that came to light during this process, but we had seen enough and wanted to move over to Datek as quickly as we could. Datek have an easy-to-use process to help customers move away from their IT provider.
About a week after the initial online audit, we had all our ducks in a row and Datek were able to start supporting us. The difference was night and day. Within a few weeks, we had full up-to-date documentation on our entire IT environment.
We also had a structured plan for moving forwards and Datek had already resolved all the red flags that had been highlighted in the audit. Our staff have more faith in logging tickets as they know their issue will be picked up in a timely manner and resolved. And we now have Cyber Essentials accreditation – all thanks to Datek.
I can whole-heartedly recommend Datek Solutions to any business that is looking for an IT Provider to take complete ownership of their IT environment.
