Step 1 – Understand & Align

In our first calls, we interview each other to ensure it’s a great fit and we want to work together. There are different values and personalities and cultures, so it needs to align.

To understand the bigger picture, we will ask questions to understand your goals, the history, the context, and anythinglse that will let us provide useful and practicable recommendations. The better we understand the bigger picture, he better we can serve your needs.

So we can help you reach your goals, it’s important to be clear on what they specifically are. Do you need a certain response time on support requests, or stay within a specific budget, or does website uptime need to be above a certain percentage?

Step 2 – Quick Wins

You may have some pressing urgent issues and fires that just gotta get sorted out. Perhaps a server is really slow or a website is down (again). We’re happy to resolve those before or during the next steps, which could take a few weeks, depending on the size and complexity of your systems.

We will need some of your help to establish access to your systems. Typically this involves account creation, sharing passwords, SSH setup, and perhaps IP whitelisting, so we can securely remote into your servers and various administration portals.

Step 3 – Research & Audit

We will review any existing documentation that you have. Often clients come to us with nothing from their existing IT provider, but whatever you do have, we’ll certainly review.

Reverse engineering is required when documentation is inadequate or non-existent. That means infiltration and reconnaissance to get the lay of the land, understand what connects to what, what is old/useless, and what’s essential to the mission.

During the technical assessment, we check each server to determine overall health, security best practices, signs of compromise, log files, patching status, disk space, backup routines, and capacity to handle the required workload.

Step 4 – Strategy & Roadmap

With the assessment complete, we can then think about the best way to reach your goals and bring the systems under our management. We will design a solution that meets your business goals from a technical standpoint. This could include decommissioning unnecessary servers, remediation, server rebuilds, migration, scalability, and high availability projects.

With a clear strategy, we can then create and present your custom game plan to implement the recommendations and bring your systems to a manageable state.

Step 5 – Onboarding

Onboarding refers to educating you on support flow and integrating tools. Developing a consistent interchange of information between our teams is critical, whether it’s email, tickets or Slack. Regular meeting cadences will be locked into our calendars. Peace of mind is achieved by establishing automated monitoring alerts, backing up every single file and database, creating authorization policies, and creating accurate initial working documentation.

The support team will be briefed and prepared to provide support. With your bigger picture, the goals, and strategy and roadmap clear, they are set up to win and deliver on the expectations.