Switching IT provider without disrupting your business
You can change IT provider without your staff noticing, and a standard handover takes two to three weeks. The key is recovering every account and password before anything is switched off, documenting what exists, and overlapping both providers for a few days. What goes wrong is never the change itself: it is a change made in a hurry, with no inventory.
The signs that it is time to move
Changing for the sake of it fixes nothing. But some situations come up in almost every company that calls us, and they share one trait: the provider reacts instead of anticipating.
- They only show up when something breaks and never propose improvements
- There are no reports: nobody knows how many tickets there were last month, or about what
- Passwords and admin accounts sit with one person, and that person does not work for you
- Backups exist but nobody has ever tested restoring them
- Every request is a separate quote and nothing is covered by the contract
- There are devices and licences nobody has an inventory of
What to recover before anything is switched off
This is the critical point, and the one that causes the most trouble when left late. Before you announce the change, make sure your company — not the provider — is the registered owner of everything that matters.
Ask in writing and check each item: the internet domain and whose name it is registered in, administrator access to email, hosting and website panels, software licences and whose name they are under, access to routers and firewalls, credentials for the antivirus and backup consoles, and contracts with carriers and manufacturers.
If anything is registered to the provider rather than your company, fix that first. You are entitled to ask, and the provider is obliged to hand over your company’s data.
What a well-run handover looks like
An orderly change has four phases and none of them is skipped. First, an audit: the incoming provider walks through servers, workstations, network, backups and licences, and hands you an inventory of what actually exists, which almost never matches what people assumed. Second, a handover plan with dates and named owners. Third, an overlap: a few days with both providers active, so no ticket falls between the two. Fourth, a formal close with documented handover of every account.
During the overlap, critical systems are left alone. Configuration changes come afterwards, once the ground is known.
What to require in the new contract
The costliest mistake is signing a new contract with the same gaps as the old one. Three things should be in writing: that passwords and accounts belong to your company and are documented in a manager you can also access; that there is a regular report covering incidents, their cause and what was done; and that backups are tested by restoring them, with a record of every test.
And a fourth, rarely asked for but very healthy: what leaving would look like. A provider who explains freely how they would hand everything back is a provider who is not holding you through dependency.
How we handle it at iDeo Networks
We have spent 18 years taking over from other providers, and we always start the same way: an audit of the real state of things before touching anything, a written inventory, and a handover plan with dates. We cover the whole of Spain, including the Canary and Balearic Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, remotely and on site, and we support international companies with operations in Spain.
If the audit shows your current provider is doing a good job, we will tell you. Switching costs money and does not always pay off.
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