No news is good news. Or is it?

Being a System Administrator isn’t an easy job. And you deserve all the appreciation and cake you can get for doing it so well.

You also deserve that ‘aaaah’ moment. The one when you feel that work is under control, your network is in good shape, your applications are patched, your data is secure, all devices are working perfectly, and everyone finally knows better than to click on suspicious links.

All is well with the world. You’re sleeping through the night, taking lunch breaks, and even thinking that you owe your Managed IT Services team a drink to say thanks – you’ve made life better for me and the business.

But then the doubts start to sneak in.

Generally, no news is good news when it comes to Managed IT Services. And that’s because their goal is to proactively deal with niggles before they become issues that impact the business. After all, that’s what you pay them for.

And in some ways, Managed IT Services are the last people you want to hear from. Until you start to worry about the silence.

What if there’s no news because issues have slipped through their net of vigilance undetected? Is your network actually being monitored 24/7? How many attempts have there been to breach your cyber defences? What routine and otherwise maintenance has been performed? Is your data backed up – and tested to make sure it’s useable if you have a ransomware attack or have to deal with a natural disaster?

And when did you last hear from a real person?

Not hearing from your Managed IT Services team is great. But even better is receiving regular reports – either on-demand or to a preset schedule – for peace of mind and to pass on to the business.

What types of reports should you expect from your Managed IT Services partner? While it will depend on the coverage offered by your plan, we suggest that, at a minimum, you ask for a quarterly managed services summary report which includes:

This should report how many calls your organisation lodged with your partner’s contact centre or support team. Ideally, you should also see open vs closed support requests to validate your partners’ responsiveness and compare the total number of support issues (and resolutions) to previous quarters.

The average time taken to resolve support calls also provides value, especially if you have ongoing concerns about the support process and are assessing if there is room for improvement.

Your partner should receive automatic notifications if any patches or antivirus solutions need updating – and then apply the required fixes. Their reporting should cover actions they’ve taken to make updates across your servers, workstations and any other devices – and specify if any devices were missing (offline) when the updates were pushed out or if any updates were scheduled to happen outside the current quarter.

Reporting stats should include the number of onsite backups, replication of onsite data to redundant offsite backup repositories, and backups of Office365 data from email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Backup success and failure rates should also be specified.

Don’t underestimate the value of knowing the volume of spam emails your Managed Services partner has blocked or any other actions they’ve taken to foil the plans of would-be attackers. Sharing these stats within the business helps maintain the awareness and preparedness essential to protecting your business – and renew training if needed.

Now, we haven’t wanted to pour cold water on your much-deserved recognition as an amazing System Administrator because we’re sure you deserve it. But it’s definitely better to be a know-it-all regarding your Managed IT Services than stuck chasing reports late at night when you’d rather be eating cake, downing a bevvy, and basking in glory.