How to switch IT support provider without the disruption

Most businesses stay with an IT provider they’ve outgrown for one reason: switching sounds like a nightmare. Planned properly, it isn’t. It isn’t effortless either, and anyone who tells you your only job is to say yes hasn’t done many of these.

The short answer: read your current contract for the notice period and renewal date, give notice yourself, and let the new provider run the handover with the old one. Make sure every administrator password changes hands, and expect to give some of your team’s time in the first month.

Start with your current contract

Your contract decides when you can move, so read it before you talk dates with anyone. Look for these:

• The notice period, and how notice has to be given: usually in writing, and to whom.
• The renewal date. Some agreements renew automatically if you miss the window, and then you’re in for another term.
• Any exit terms, such as a fee for leaving early, or licences and equipment you’re tied into for months yet.
• What the provider has to hand over when you leave. If the contract says nothing, ask for their offboarding process.

We won’t tell you what a typical notice period is, because contracts vary too much for a typical one to help. Read yours, and if a clause is unclear, ask the provider to explain it in writing.

Getting your admin access and documentation back

Your admin passwords and your domain name belong to you, not to your IT company. In the handover, ask the outgoing provider for:

• Every administrator account and password for your systems, including Microsoft 365, the firewall, the Wi-Fi and the backup.
• Who controls your domain name, where it’s registered and when it renews. A domain registered years ago in someone else’s name is a classic trap.
• A list of your licences and subscriptions, with their renewal dates.
• Whatever documentation they keep, such as setup notes and network diagrams.

Once the new provider has taken over, it resets every administrator password and switches off the old provider’s access, so the only people with the keys are you and them. If the old provider never wrote anything down, the new one documents your network in the first month.

Timing the move

• Work back from your notice date. The new provider needs time for the audit and the migration plan before your notice runs out.
• Plan an overlap rather than a gap. The old provider keeps looking after you until the notice ends, which covers anything quirky that was missed.
• Steer clear of your busiest weeks, such as your year end or a big deadline.
• Ask the outgoing provider one question early: is there anything that will stop this going smoothly, such as an unpaid bill? When a handover goes badly, it’s usually over a bill.

Treat the old provider the way you’d want to be treated. Most are professional and have done this many times, and a civil handover is a faster one.

How a switch to Jera works

Four steps, and each one tells you what you get:

1. Book an IT audit and business review. We audit your IT and security, learn how your business runs, and tell you plainly what we’d change and what we’d leave alone. You get an honest opinion, with no obligation.
2. Review the migration plan. We map your systems and agree the handover with your current provider. You see the plan, the timings and the costs before you sign anything.
3. Sign up and complete the migration. We collect everything from your current provider, install our monitoring, document your network and reset every administrator password. You get a named account manager from day one.
4. Create your roadmap, build your agent(s). Together we create your 12 to 24 month technology roadmap, and build your first AI agent free. You pay for the AI it uses.

We review the move with you at 30, 60 and 90 days. The full detail is on our switch page.

What switching asks of you

Most of the work is ours, but not all of it:

• You give your current provider notice, because the contract is yours.
• You and your leadership team spend time with us on the audit and business review.
• Your team joins a get-to-know-us meeting in the first month, so everyone knows how to get help from us.
• Someone answers our questions about how things work today, usually more than once.

That’s the honest price of a move.

The cost of staying put

Every month with a provider that isn’t keeping up has a price: problems that keep coming back, and decisions about your technology that never get made. Switching is a project with an end date. Staying with the wrong provider isn’t.

How Jera can help

If you’re thinking about moving, see how our switch works, or book a call with your current contract to hand and we’ll walk you through what a move to Jera would look like for your business.