Mini-Series Part 1: 10 Important Questions to Ask your IT Partner

There’s more to choosing an IT partner than just searching for a solution that meets your technical requirements. Your partner will become an extension of your team, so it’s important to take the time to find the right fit, and asking the right questions is the first step in creating a trusting and lasting relationship. In this mini-series we’ll explore the most important questions we’d want you to ask someone like us!

Question 1: What is your backup process?

Do you know how much stress you can manage during a disaster based on the time, energy and technical burden you can handle? A good starting to point to answering those questions is to determine your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

What Is It?
RPO refers to the point in time you go back to retrieve the files you’ve backed up and will depend on how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster. Your IT service provider’s backup solution should be able to meet your retention requirements and address software and hardware fails.

RTO is slightly different, but just as important, as it’s defined by how much downtime your business can handle – so, the minimum amount of time it will take to get up and running in the event of a disaster. With a backup solution, you can choose the amount of time between backups, whether it be once a day or every 2 hours.

At Whipcord, we have a comprehensive Network Operations Centre (NOC), which is our hub for all things IT and customer support. We provide a high-touch approach to service to support our customers 24x7x365 to address any potential or current technical fails, and utilize various software packages and utilities to provide internal security for our solutions.

Your IT partner should also have the capabilities to store your data at multiple locations in the event the data centre experiences a disaster.

Whipcord’s flagship data centre in Lethbridge, Alberta, was constructed according to a Tier 3 design with redundancy of all major service elements; power, cooling and network systems, as well as being in an extremely low risk area. We also have facilities in Canada’s largest carrier hotels in Vancouver (20+ unique networks and direct access to the Vancouver Internet Exchange) and in Toronto (150+ unique networks and direct access to the building’s Meet Me Rooms within the Cologix facility).

Stay One Step Ahead

The first step in choosing an IT Partner is asking the right questions that help you find the best fit for your business. At the end of the day, you put a lot of trust into your partner so it’s important that they’re not only knowledgeable, but a good fit for your company.

Want to ask us this question? Schedule a meeting with one of our regional sales managers! Otherwise, keep an eye out for the next question in our mini-series or access the downloadable PDF below.