Is our IT support actually proactive, or just reactive?
Proactive IT support monitors systems continuously and fixes issues before they cause downtime, while reactive support only responds after something breaks and a ticket is filed. The clearest test is simple: ask your provider how many issues they resolved last month before you ever noticed a problem.
Most businesses don't realize their support is purely reactive until something fails that should have been caught weeks earlier — a disk filling up, a certificate about to expire, a backup that quietly stopped completing. If your provider can't show you a list of issues they caught before you reported them, you're paying for a fire department, not a maintenance team.
Talk to us about what proactive monitoring should actually catch.