How Your Support Agreement Safeguards Technology Investment
We all know that information technology has become crucial for organisations across all industries, particularly in the past two years. It becomes clear, therefore, that ensuring that there are limited outages and smooth IT systems operation is vital, not only for ongoing success but to drive sustainable return on the investments made.
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Effective Support Agreements are the key to managing that ROI, a form of insurance policy that should not only minimise issues but help with software upgrades and improve processes throughout the organisation.
Support Agreements come in various forms but are essentially designed to provide rapid response to issues within an organisation's infrastructure network, bringing in outside expertise to complement internal resources.
A good Service Agreement will ensure high priority support and response, both in and outside office hours and should cover support and maintenance while helping IT teams to adopt new features, releases, and service packs.
With companies such as Microsoft continually releasing system upgrades, rather than the old approach of new releases every few years, it is important to be able to ensure your team continues to take advantage of your investment.
We see three main types of Service Agreement being utilised by our partners.
1. Break-Fix Agreements:
These are very popular, as they offer a fixed cost for the year. CFOs like this approach as it provides clarity on yearly costs.
2. Draw-Down of Support Days:
Here an organisation can purchase a set number of days for issues to be resolved, modifications or enhancements to be made. It can be used to bring in more expertise for key projects and provides a flexible approach for continuous improvement of the solution. In addition, if any Support Days are unused at the end of the year, they roll over to the next year.
3. Full Enterprise Agreement
This provides “Evergreen” support to a premium standard with rolling updates and health checks, regular diagnostics and a tight partnership between the support company and the partner organisation.
Here at Storm, we have a dedicated support team: experienced professionals who have dedicated themselves and their careers to being great at Support, building their knowledge and expertise over many years.
For our clients, this means continuity with their support partner, providing access to individuals who are passionate about helping them to succeed and who have a deep knowledge of the technical infrastructure.
For further details on how our Support Team can help your business get in touch today!
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