How do you know if your IT provider is any good?

Most businesses find out theirs is not, at the worst possible moment. A server dies on the Monday of the busiest week. A staff member’s email gets into someone else’s hands and nobody notices for three weeks. The backup everyone assumed was running turns out to have been failing since March.

The honest answer is that you should not have to be technical to tell. You should be able to ask when your backup was last restored and how long it took, and get a straight number back. You should know what is included in what you pay and what is not. And when something needs a person in the building, a person should turn up.

That is the standard we work to for businesses across Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne.

Call 1300 624 357 and tell us what is breaking.

What managed IT from Mason‑Brown IT includes

Managed IT means we take on the IT function for your business, instead of you calling someone each time something breaks.

• Monitoring and patching across your servers, network and devices, so we see problems before your staff report them
• A helpdesk your team can call when something is not working
• Backup, with restore testing, because a backup nobody has ever restored from is not a backup
• Security built in rather than sold separately: email filtering, endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication and staff awareness training
• Microsoft 365 and Azure, plus hardware, licensing and lifecycle planning
• Onsite attendance when the problem is physical, which it often is

If you also need phones, internet or printing, we do those too, which means one supplier instead of three and nobody blaming the other two.

Externally audited, not self-assessed

Every IT provider says they take security seriously. Very few can point to someone outside the business who has checked.

Worth being precise about what this does and does not mean. Our certification says something about how we operate. It does not make your environment certified or compliant, and any provider who tells you otherwise is overselling it. What it does mean is that when your insurer, your auditor or your largest client asks how your IT provider handles security, you have a documented answer instead of a reassurance.

We hold three ISO certifications

ISO 27001, information security management. How we handle information, including yours, is documented and audited against an international standard.

ISO 9001, quality management. How we deliver work is documented and audited, which is why the process looks the same whether you are our largest client or our newest.

ISO 42001, AI management systems. This one is new and rare. If your staff have started using AI tools and you are wondering who is thinking about the governance, this is the answer.