Short answer: changing IT providers is a planned sequence that runs over several weeks, and your staff should be working normally through nearly all of it.
A lot of businesses stay with a provider they're unhappy with for years. In my experience, the reason is rarely loyalty. Nobody has explained how leaving works, so people picture one day when everything gets unplugged and nothing comes back on.
We've run this transition many times as the incoming provider. Here is what happens, in order, including the steps I'd take before anybody gives notice.
If you're still deciding whether to move at all, start with the reasons businesses actually leave. This post assumes you have already decided.
What to do before you give notice
Most of the hard parts of switching trace back to something that was not settled before notice went out. None of these steps involve your current provider. I would do every one of them even if you end up staying.
First, find out what you own. That means your domain name, your Microsoft 365 tenant (your company account with Microsoft), your software licenses, your phone numbers, your website, and the accounts behind each of them. What matters is whose name they are registered in, which can differ from who manages them day to day.
More often than I'd like, I find a domain or a license sitting under the provider's account instead of the business account. Finding that during a planned move is a few days of paperwork. Finding it in the middle of a dispute is much harder.
Second, make sure someone at your business holds an administrator login for each of those accounts. If only your provider can get in, that is the first thing I'd fix.
Third, get an independent picture of your environment, including what is running and what depends on what. Any competent incoming provider will do this as an IT assessment, with no changes made and no notice given. I'd keep the document whatever you decide.
That assessment is what you'll check the outgoing handover against. Without it, you have no clear way to tell whether the handover is complete.
Fourth, read the exit clause in your contract. Look for the notice period, the renewal date, whether renewal is automatic, and what it says about handing over your data and final invoicing. The clause is usually short. It's also the one most likely to cost you several months, so read it yourself instead of relying on someone else to summarize it. Our guide to the questions to ask before you sign an IT contract covers the clauses worth checking.
The steps, in order
Once those are done, the switch itself follows the same order every time.
- Notice. Give it in the form the contract requires and by the date it requires. Keep it short and factual. You are about to need cooperation from the people receiving it, so there is nothing to gain from a letter that reads as an accusation.
- Documentation. The incoming provider builds a record of how your environment works. Some of it comes from the outgoing provider and some from what the new one finds, and the two rarely match. This stage decides whether the rest goes well, and because clients can't see it, it is the one most often skipped.
- Credentials and access. This is when the logins actually change hands: administrator accounts, your domain and DNS settings (what points your domain at your email and website), the Microsoft 365 tenant, backup consoles, firewall and network equipment, line-of-business applications, and the vendor accounts behind them. Each one moves deliberately, one at a time, instead of all at once.
- The handover. This is where responsibility passes to the new provider. Done properly, it is a scheduled sequence of changes instead of a single cutover.
- The first few weeks. Routine maintenance and backup checks start running under the new provider, and the issues from the assessment get worked through at the pace you set. We wrote a longer post on what a methodical onboarding involves.
Who holds your passwords
Shared administrator passwords are usually held by whoever set them. There is rarely a record anywhere of who that was. People worry about this part of switching more than most, and it is one of the easier ones to resolve.
At handover, every administrator login should either be handed over and then changed, or replaced with a new login and the old one disabled. Every account gets one of those two treatments, with no exceptions for convenience.
The accounts nobody thinks of are where this goes wrong. I'd include remote access tools, the logins at your internet provider and domain registrar, the security camera system, the account that receives alerts, and any personal account a technician used to set something up years ago.
A good incoming provider makes a list and works down it. Businesses that have never done this often have old access still open years later. By then, nobody remembers whose it is.
Who owns your licenses
Software you pay for should be licensed to your business, in an account your business controls, with someone at your business holding an administrator login. That is where you want to end up. I'd check it instead of assuming it.
Where that is not the case, the fix is usually a transfer. It takes a few days and needs the outgoing provider to cooperate. If they won't, you sometimes have to buy the license again, which is annoying but has a known cost. Either way, it is much easier to handle as an item on a list than as a surprise on cutover day.
How to handle the outgoing provider
The incoming provider should deal with the outgoing one directly. Refereeing that exchange is not your job. Putting a client in the middle of it is a common mistake in this industry.
Our rule is that we don't criticize the provider we are replacing, during the handover or after it. We haven't seen their side of it. And a provider who opens with what the last one did wrong will probably say the same about you someday.
Most outgoing providers behave professionally, which surprises people who have prepared for a fight. Some of the smoothest transitions I've been part of had real help from the provider being replaced.
How long it takes
For a business of 9 to 99 people with reasonable documentation, the disruptive part is usually a day or two. The full sequence, from assessment to settled, runs over several weeks. Your staff won't see most of it.
When a switch goes badly, it is almost always for the same reason. Nothing was documented, so the handover turns into weeks of working out how things were set up. That is a reason to start the documentation before you give notice, and it is why the assessment comes first.
We hold ourselves to the same standard
If leaving your current provider is hard, that tells you something about the arrangement. It is not a reason to stay in it.
The same test applies to us. That is why we document client environments the way we do. If a client decides to leave us someday, I want that handover to be easy. I want clients to stay each year because they want to.
If you want the assessment without committing to anything after it, that is where we start. It changes nothing in your environment and nobody has to be given notice. You keep the written report even if the conclusion is to stay where you are.
If you'd like to talk it through first, book a free 15-minute call. I'm happy to help.