Many organizations stay with their current managed service provider (MSP) because they assume changing providers will be expensive, disruptive, or risky.
The truth is that for most businesses, the cost of switching IT providers is often much lower than expected. While every environment is different, most organizations discover that the largest obstacles are not financial costs, but concerns about change and the fear of potential disruption.
The One Significant Cost: Existing Contracts
The most substantial hard cost associated with changing MSPs is typically an existing contractual obligation. Some providers require clients to fulfill the remainder of a contract term or pay an early termination fee. Outside of contractual obligations, direct financial costs are often limited.
Minimal Training Requirements
Users may need to learn how to submit a support ticket, contact the help desk, understand escalation procedures, or use a customer portal. For most employees, the learning curve is minimal.
Transition and Onboarding Activities
A new MSP will typically spend time learning your environment, reviewing network configurations, validating backups, documenting systems, and assessing cybersecurity controls. Reputable providers often include much of this work as part of onboarding.
What About Downtime?
In a well-managed transition, users often notice little to no disruption. Most transition activities occur behind the scenes and do not affect day-to-day operations.
The Hidden Cost of Not Switching
Organizations often focus on the cost of changing providers while overlooking the cost of staying with a provider that no longer meets their needs. Slow response times, recurring issues, poor communication, and weak cybersecurity practices can create ongoing costs.
The Bottom Line
For most organizations, the actual hard costs of changing managed service providers are limited. Aside from potential contractual obligations, the transition often involves only minor employee training and communication changes.
Mainstream Technologies Perspective
At Mainstream Technologies, our goal is to make transitions as seamless as possible. We handle technical coordination, documentation review, security validation, and onboarding activities needed to minimize disruption. Most end users only need to know one thing: how to contact us when they need help.