IT Support London | 5-Star Business IT Services & Solutions

Our award-winning London IT Support is here to make your life easier and improve the everyday working lives of your employees through technology. We’ll handle all the technical and logistical stuff, so you don’t need your own IT department along with the associated expensive IT specialists to handle IT challenges.

Our team of 40+ IT experts are based in Vauxhall, City of London ready to help your business, and staff members with our IT support services. It’s always helpful to put a name to a face, even when we’re dealing with the technical details.

We’ve put this guide together to help you figure out how to get started, where to look, and a little more about us. There’s plenty of resources for our customers and end users along the way that we’ve already put together. If you need any more information, you know how to find us.

Quick links

• Selecting a London IT support Company
• Managed IT support
• Our IT support package
• Zero-touch onboarding

Selecting a London IT Support company

Selecting an IT support company is often the first major commercial decision many businesses take.
Before selecting a support company it is of paramount importance to consult with your team and nail down precisely what you require in terms of support packages and ask yourself questions like:

• What areas of your IT operation do you need help with the most?
• How much contact do you require with an Account Manager or Account Managers?
• What is your annual IT support budget for IT projects?
• What cyber security concerns do you have?
• How much day-to-day IT support do you need?

When sifting through IT support packages and proposals, relate each one back to your business needs.

We have a video that can help to clarify a few things.

How to choose an IT support company

So you’ve taken the first step to kicking your IT systems and processes up a notch. That’s fantastic. But how do you choose who to work with? It can feel like a bit of a minefield.

IT support providers are unique in that, unlike accountants, marketing consultants, and other partners, they work alongside your team and other users day in and day out to help you achieve your business objectives.

And so it’s important to choose the right provider first time for your IT system.

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Here are the top 5 factors to consider when choosing an IT support company:

Number 1. Background checks.

Given that IT support service providers and technology partners will have daily access to your business-critical systems, data, IT projects, and intellectual property over the course of a twelve-month contract, you need to ensure that they are a fit and proper organisation before conducting an initial meeting.

From a compliance perspective, here are a few things you may want to consider.

Due diligence. You need to make sure that the provider is not a sole trader and is a registered company. Also consider using credit check resources such as Company Check.

You cannot afford to entrust your systems and IT projects to a one-man-band. It’s also important to ensure that any prospective IT support provider has been operating in the marketplace for a requisite amount of time.

Use Google. If an IT support company has a bad reputation or has operated suspiciously, the internet probably knows about it. Google is your friend. Research their name and company history to expose any bad reviews or incidents of misconduct.

Check their certifications. While the industry has no official regulatory body, IT support companies should be compliant with a number of accepted global standards.

There’s the ISO9001 & ISO27001, which is an internationally recognised series of standards, Microsoft Partner status which IT companies are awarded with either a silver or a gold partnership, and the ITIL. A globally accepted method of delivering IT services and handling asset management.

Number 2. IT support staff.

After ensuring your prospective IT support company is legitimate, you should focus on the people who will be delivering the end product. Its staff. Ask for a video call or face-to-face meeting with the following key team members before signing a contract to gage what kind of personalities you’re going to be dealing with.

The Account Manager. The Service Desk Manager. The Tier 3 Engineers or Senior Engineers.

It is important to remember your own staff will not be familiar with industry terminology. With that in mind make sure that anyone you meet can articulate key IT concepts in plain English without overloading on technical terms of acronyms.

You also need to have a firm grasp on an IT support company’s underlying ability to offer a service plan. Make sure you ascertain how many people they employ, how many offices they work from, and what their staff retention levels are like. An IT support company that employs more than 50 people in multiple locations are unlikely to be able to provide a personalised service.

Number 3. Reviews and references.

The internet provides many ways to check on the kind of services an IT support company provides to its clients. Feefo and Google are all globally renowned review services that provide an invaluable insight into how a prospective IT partner does business.

Rather than glossing over the number of stars provided, be sure to read individual reviews and anecdotal accounts of support, even if it is an award-winning IT support company. Ask the provider for a set of references that are relevant to your industry. If you’re a legal firm, ask for a letter of recommendation from another firm of solicitors. If you work in the public sector, make sure that you speak to other public sector organisations that the provider has worked with.

Ask questions about day-to-day support and industry-specific software that you use.

Number 4. IT support contracts.

Perhaps the most important part of the entire tendering process is being sure of what you’re signing. The IT support industry is awash with tales of unwitting businesses who have committed to a contract that ties them into unwanted services or extended contract lengths. Here are some things you may need to watch out for.

The contract length. This should, in maximum, only be 12 months long. Unwanted pre-packaged services. Unfair termination clauses. Unspecified account management procedures. Unspecified or vague operating hours.

When it comes to service level agreements, or SLAs, be sure to scrutinise the company’s published service SLAs that govern their accepted response and resolution times. The contract should clearly outline how the IT support company prioritises incoming IT support requests and deals with change management.

Most IT support companies in London operate under a priority system for individual support tickets for customers and adjust their client response and resolution times accordingly.

And last, but by no means least.

Number 5: The onboarding process.

Whether you are switching between IT support providers or contracting one for the first time, it’s important to understand precisely how they’re going to integrate you onto their support and monitoring platform. And how they plan to deploy any software after the contract has been signed.

IT support companies should never charge for this service. Make sure you ask for a dedicated point of contact who can furnish you with an official onboarding schedule so that you can forward-plan for any disaster recovery and disruption to your business.

An onboarding process should also include site visits to your company offices. This enables the support company to tag equipment with a unique asset number, take photographs of key pieces of hardware such as servers, cyber security firewalls, and switches, and introduce themselves to members of the management team.

Well, those were the top 5 things to consider when choosing IT support service providers.

Here are some more resources from the archive to help you choose the best IT support company in London for your business.

From the blog

• A guide to IT outsourcing for small businesses in London
• Determining ROI as you outsource IT support to London
• Managed IT Services in London

Getting started with managed IT support

So now you know a bit more about how to make the right choice for you. But what are you getting yourself in for?

Every London-based IT support provider will have a different way of working. Clarity and transparency are super important to us, so we like to explain what our process looks like upfront.

To make things a little easier, we’ve split this into three parts.

1. Audit and proposal
2. What happens between the proposal and go-live
3. Going live on our support system

Part 1: Audit & proposal (yes, it’s free)

The process goes a little something like this:

• We all meet, in person or online, to chat about your needs
• We conduct a detailed IT audit
• We establish your current set-up, any gaps, and requirements
• We’ll provide recommendations and solutions
• Following our chat, we’ll send you a proposal, timelines, costs, etc.

Simple as that.

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Part 2: From proposal sign-off to go-live

Here’s a quick summary of what the process looks like, from signing off the proposal to going live with your new infrastructure and support:

• Your team signs off the proposal
• Our sales team meets with our projects team
• We all (your team, our sales team, and our project team) have a kick-off meeting to make sure everyone involved is on the same page and you’re happy with our approach
• We assign a dedicated project manager and IT support engineers to your project
• We implement everything discussed including onboarding and infrastructure transformation (see section below)
• This takes about 6-8 weeks in total
• Your dedicated project manager hands over, thoroughly, to our support desk team and Customer Success Manager, ready to help you on an ongoing basis

Our expertise and support is available remotely 24/7 for the sake of ease and speed. But we also provide onsite IT support for businesses throughout London.

Part 3: Going live with our IT support system

Once your new systems and processes are in place, it’s time to go live with support.

Here’s what that go-live process looks like:

• Create documentation related to your organisation for the helpdesk IT team
• Set up your organisation on the IT Support Platform
• Schedule a meeting with your internal IT point of contact
• Explain how tickets are raised, what the processes are, etc.
• Set up your dedicated support portal (this includes new starter and leaver forms)
• Send your staff a helpful welcome email with an explainer video

A few more resources to help you get started

• How to set your IT budget
• IT support best practices to help your business succeed
• Answering your 4 biggest questions about IT support providers
• 5 things to consider when choosing an IT support company
• 5 signs it’s time to reach out for IT support services

Our award-winning IT support services for London-based businesses

To get a little more technical about it for a second (because we know there may be specific things you want to check for) here is a quick list of what is included in our standard IT support packages:

• Unlimited remote IT support via phone & email
• Proactive maintenance of IT infrastructure
• New staff on-boarding & staff leavers off-boarding
• Hardware advisory, purchase & lease
• Hardware audit and asset management
• Weekly or monthly helpdesk report
• Monthly or quarterly Account Management meetings
• IT Director service (1-hour free IT consultancy per month)

There’s a bunch of other stuff we also have available on request (just let us know when we have our first meeting)

The go-to IT Support London Company

• IT security
• IT setup
• IT consultancy services
• Mailbox & data migrations
• Google Workspace migrations
• Microsoft 365 migrations
• Microsoft 365 training
• Hosted solutions
• Hardware purchase & lease
• Office moves
• Internet & telephony setup
• Network infrastructure setup
• Network cabling
• Network & network security setup
• Cyber security solutions
• Disaster recovery

Small business IT support in London

Outsourcing your IT support to a proven, trusted, expert and highly experienced team (like ours here at totality services) delivers many tangible advantages. These include:

Total peace of mind

You can work with confidence, knowing that your IT is constantly being monitored and maintained so your team can securely access and utilise it from any device, in any location and at any time.

The proactive nature of managed IT service solutions has ‘prevention is better than cure’ at its heart. That means issues are reported and resolved long before they become business-stalling problems.

Levelling the playing field

IT rapidly advances, as do the expectations of your customers, so you have to keep up. The good news is your small business IT support service will deploy, optimise, and enable you to benefit from, the latest, fastest, and most cost-effective technologies; the kind of kit bigger, better-funded businesses take for granted.

Your managed IT support partner will also keep the software your organisation uses regularly updated with the vendor’s patches and fixes, while regularly backing up your data. The result is that your systems and data stay secure, available and operate at peak performance.

Greater value for money and easier to plan around

For a small business based in London (which already has high overheads to contend with), managed IT support services are generally less expensive than the alternatives – such as employing in-house expertise or the break/fix model. They will almost certainly be cheaper than the cost of any operational downtime and delay you experience if any part of your IT infrastructure fails.

Additionally, a monthly-based agreed and fixed subscription to your small businesses IT support provider makes your financial planning and budgeting accurate and simple.

Access to a highly experienced and expert team

First and foremost, choosing a managed IT services partner gives you access to the specialist skills and knowledge of their fully trained and certified professionals, so you can be confident your IT infrastructure is always working at its best to deliver business continuity. In providing your team with the capabilities you lack, your MSP can hone your competitive edge and boost your productivity, profitability and growth.

Safety, security and compliance

In recent research amongst CEOs across the world, cybercrime was seen as the biggest global threat to business. If your small operation doesn’t have the latest security and protection tools in place, you’re a victim waiting to happen.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking you haven’t systems worth hacking or data worth stealing. From phishing to ransomware and viruses to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, cybercrime is a clear and present 24/7 danger to every enterprise in our interconnected, always-on world.

Your small business IT support provider can help you to deploy the latest security measures and advise you and your team on the best cybersecurity practices. Moreover, they can perform proactive around the clock data security checks to detect threats and prevent theft and intrusion.

Another crucial factor is that your MSP can keep your company compliant with all the latest regulations and protocols, like the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is especially important around the protection of sensitive information, breaches of which can lead to tough penalties and fines.

Enabling you to focus on your business

Running a London-based business is hard enough without having to worry about ongoing IT problems and their solutions.

Your small business IT support partner will free you up to concentrate on managing your enterprise and all the important tasks that entails, while they manage your IT. This pays dividends if you’re not good at undertaking those regular updates, back-ups and all the other niggling technical requirements which tend to get overlooked in a busy business.

The ability to change as your business does

One of the key benefits of a managed IT service for your small business is their flexibility and scalability. Opt for a standard package, chose a complete end-to-end solution or simply cherry-pick the support capabilities you need for particular projects – everything can evolve as your business does.

Trusted IT support for 150+ local London businesses

24/7 IT support
Round-the-clock IT support service for networks, 365 days a year from our friendly team of experts, whether via a phone call or online

Security in safe hands
Microsoft Partner and ISO 27001 & ISO 9001 certified

Going beyond business support
We work with the CC Foundation to provide laptop access to London’s underprivileged kids

Kind words from our clients

Mansoor Jilani, NICCE, Fast Growing Clothing Label
“totality explains complex issues in a really professional and friendly way. We needed someone who could understand the business IT support issues we face on a daily basis. They do a fantastic job”

Ken Marchesi, Nederlander Theatres, Prestigious Theatre Company
“They make the process of IT support really enjoyable. When we came onboard, they looked at our current system, identified what the problems were and helped us to find a solution”

Robert Hill, Greater London Properties, Multi-site Estate Agent
“When we ask totality to do something, it gets done. It’s as simple as that. All the staff are super friendly and their attention to detail is great. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them”

Zero-touch onboarding for new employees

So now you know what’s included, we wanted to pop in and mention one of the best things about working with us.

You know those awkward tech handover meetings where either you or your new starters have to come to an office while systems are updated, security protocols are added, and the right cyber security software is added to a laptop, desktop, or Mac?
No one likes those days. That’s why we don’t do them.

Zero-touch onboarding for all of your new starters is great for everyone. Why?

• Gives your new starters a great first impression
• It’s efficient, saving both time and money
• Means all employees, in the office or remote, get the same tech experience
• Keeps things simple for you and your new starters

Helping new starters settle in with the help of IT Support professionals

To help your new employees really feel at home in their new roles, we’ll send them two parcels. One contains all of their tech, fully set up and ready to go. The second is a box of branded items (your branding, not ours). We’re talking hoodies, water bottles, notebooks, that sort of thing.

We find it really adds to the employee experience and gets new folks off to a great start.

The little things make the biggest difference to your employees’ experiences.

 

Frequently Asked Questions