Is your support team in house, or do you use outside partners?

This is one of the questions worth asking every provider you talk to, and one most of them answer vaguely. Here is ours plainly.

Everything you experience as support is our own people. The person who answers the phone, the technician who works your ticket, the senior engineer it escalates to, the one who comes to your office, and the one who picks up after hours. All employees, all here in Jacksonville. There is no white-labeled help desk behind us, no overflow queue, and nobody reading from a script who has never seen your network.

The one exception, stated clearly. Security monitoring runs around the clock, and a team of our size cannot have a human watching a screen at three in the morning every night of the year. So the monitoring platform is ours, running in house, holding your data, with the rules and the tuning done by us. The around-the-clock analyst watch on top of it is a security operations center partner.

What matters about how that is arranged:

• You never talk to them and they never contact you. If something fires at 3am, it reaches our on-call person, and our on-call person contacts you. One phone number, one relationship, one company accountable.
• The platform and the data stay ours. We are not reselling somebody else's service with our logo on it. The logs come into our system, we built the detections, and we can tell you exactly what is being watched and why.
• We would rather tell you this than let you assume. Plenty of providers run the same arrangement and describe it as their own 24/7 security team. It is a reasonable model. It just should not be a surprise to you later.

Why we do not outsource the help desk, since that is the part this question is usually really about. The value of a small local provider is that the person picking up has been in your building and knows that the machine in question runs your practice software. Hand that to an overflow desk and you have the response time of a small provider with the context of a large one, which is the worst of both. We would rather be honest about capacity than quietly paper over it.

What to ask anyone else: are the people answering my calls your own employees, do you use a NOC or SOC and would I ever speak to them directly, is any part of this offshore, and who is accountable when something falls between you and a partner. The answers vary enormously and they are rarely volunteered.