KPIs you should be measuring to ensure your IT is providing ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is an omnipresent subject matter in the business world, and rightly so. Businesses with a strong grip on expenditure are more likely to be able to traverse the rough seas of both periods of growth and recession.

However, when it comes to tracking the performance of your IT provider, many people are at a loss as to what they should keep track of. Here are some of our best tips to help you move forwards.

1 – Budgeted spend vs actual spend

An experienced IT support provider should work with you to understand your business and how you operate. If they understand your journey and what you set out to achieve then this can help forecast potential issues and give you a realistic projection of costs. Of course, there may be times when extra support is needed, but getting to know each other is key to bringing down actualised spend.

2 – Delivery times

It’s important that your IT partner not only delivers a high standard of support to you but that they also deliver them to you on time. Projects that overrun can mean loss of earnings and your customers choosing to take their business elsewhere. So it’s important that expectations are clear from the off as to how much time is needed to complete a project.

3 – Average time for troubleshooting

When it comes to tackling everyday IT issues there is no one size fits all approach, and the answer to “how long will it take to fix any issues that arise?” will always be “it depends”.

Again, communication is critical here and it is crucial for both parties to outline what they expect. Customers should be clear to their providers in their assessments of problems when they report them.

For instance, how urgent is the issue, how many people has it affected, and when does the issue need to be solved? This type of triage approach, helps IT providers to prioritize issues and move their resources around to get to a quicker solution.

When looking back to assess the responsiveness of your IT provider, you should look at the average time it takes to solve a problem, rather than the longest amount of time it took to solve one particular problem.

4 – Uptime vs Downtime

A simple concept to understand. This type of information can help you see how long your business has been online vs how long you have been unable to perform your regular activities. A good provider should ensure that any impactful work like network maintenance will take place during your out-of-office hours, or quieter periods.

5 – Recovery Point Objective

We’ve written recently about the importance of having a backup in place. This means, should disaster strike, such as a fire, flood, or cyber-attack – you’re able to maintain business as usual. Backups replicate your files in a secure location and enable you to quickly restore your data.

Of course, every business is different and while some – think banks and financial institutions – may require backups that save your data down to the millisecond, others might require less accuracy.

A recovery point objective determines the interval at which your backups should take place – for instance, every minute, every hour or every 24 hours.

6 – Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Similarly, Recovery Time Objective (RTO) signifies the amount of downtime your business can tolerate in the event of a system failure. This can help your provider to act quickly should an incident arise, and know their expected deadline.

These are just a handful of common KPIs that businesses might choose to track. However, there are many more that can be monitored and reported upon. Developing an understanding of these key points can help you to decipher how well your current provider is meeting your needs, and whether it might be time to move elsewhere.

We Can Help You

Here at ECL, we provide a comprehensive range of IT services including Disaster Recovery that can help you with tools like VMware and HyperV. To find out more about our services, get in touch with our team of experts today.