How to Migrate from One Managed Service Provider to Another

End of Support

When signing up for a new Managed Services Provider you should finalize dates of when a new Managed Services Provider will take on support for your company and the old provider will cease support. There should be at least 2 weeks ( recommended 1 Month ) in between for a handover period, to make sure there is no drop in IT Support Quality for your Company.

Migration

Your new MSP should help you with below automatically but this is a list for any company or project manager needing to understand what should be completed.

  • Documentation - Make sure all Documentation from the old provider is handed over to the new one and it is as up-to-date as possible. The company being Supported should also have copies of this on file. The new company should check this and make sure any questions have been answered by the new provider. This should be sent over in a password protected encrypted format (password sent by another means of communication e.g. SMS ).
     
  • Migration of servers if needed - If your servers are stored onsite you don't need to worry about this, however, some servers are hosted virtually with MSP's hardware or hosted in a rack owned by the MSP. You will need to investigate Physical or Virtual Migrations. If hosted with Services such as Azure/AWS the company should have their own login to these portals
     
  • Migration of Services if needed - Double check what services the Old MSP currently provide that will cease after the support. This could be DNS Hosting, Website Hosting, 365 Tenant hosting, Mail Hosting, Domain Registration, Mail Filtering.
     
  • Support Agreements - Make sure you have a list of all Third Party Support Agreements currently held by the company such as Vmware, Firewall, Web Filtering, Veeam
  • Software - Make sure you have a list of all software purchased by your company or old MSP as well as keys. Usually, you should have a login to the VLSC from Microsoft as well.
     
  • Monitoring - Make sure the old provider removes all their monitoring that has been set up to an external ( not internal ) system.
     
  • Antivirus - Make sure the old Antivirus is removed by the old provider and the new one has been installed.
     
  • RMM - Remote Monitoring Again make sure the old RMM tool is removed from all computers and the new one is installed by the new provider.

Passwords

Hopefully all your passwords have been stored in a password database either internally or hosted with the MSP. These should be handed over to the new provider. This should be sent over in a password protected encrypted format (password sent by another means of communication e.g. SMS )

Cutover Day

  • Make sure all your Staff know the new provider details and means to lodge support tickets
  • Access Accounts - For security reasons all service, root and domain admin passwords should be reset and updates on the needed system. Also remote access should be blocked from the old MSP
  • Create a rule on your Email server to monitor any emails going to the old MSP - This will catch old monitoring services etc.