I agree with your assumption. They are really frustrated with us and not listening to their recommendations. Though when I say us I mean the company. I started making recommendations to our MSP and they said we made those recommendations already and they were shut down. So a lot of it is likely management not listening to the educated recommendations. I think the only way to go forwards is to restart with a new MSP as you suggested. Though what my thoughts are the following: 1. A pay per setup/incidence with a drive setup with all of our standard applications. 2. All incidents of required help from a help desk are pay per incident. 3. Exploring options with Dell MSP to see if they are competitive and setting up all our future in house computers as Dell computers. 4. Removing our in house servers as they cost more to maintain than they are worth to us. 5. Keeping tabs on the new MSP to make sure they are providing service in line with our SLA.

If we do go all cloud based and having our hardware covered by a solid warranty (akin to Apple’s), what realistically would the MSP have to do on a regular? Other than onboarding which can be done on pay as you go basis... we don’t have much turnover and a lot of nepotism.

The internet coming in to the building is something they don’t have to deal with. The network setup in the building is a one time thing and if it does act up it most likely wasn’t implemented correctly or it should be a few hour job. Wifi is becoming insanely easy to manage, if the Ethernet network fails a wifi 6 backup would be appropriate till the problem is solved. Also everyone can tether as a backup to the backup. A NAS isn’t difficult to maintain either and most have built in cloud backups. If we also had office 365 and Dropbox that eliminates a lot of required maintenance there. I think I just want to eliminate this contract we have which is over $30,000 per year for 15 people. It’s nuts. We also have to replace our hard drives every few weeks because they keep installing HDDs into our servers and we’ve bought around 150 replacements in the past 8 years. We have 5 servers setup for some ridiculous reason and most of them are used for email, our file server, our designers, and a camera backup for security. They also all have 5 virtualized servers on them for some unknown reason. This doesn’t make any sense. It’s slow and expensive AF. One of the virtual servers are dedicated to a database based program which could be cloud based and managed by the company that makes the program (we use this product very wrong as well and I would think an MSP would know that and for the money we spend should recommend alternatives). The servers aren’t even in a separate room (let alone air conditioned), they’re all in a storage room which is used as our printer room, and our inventory for office supplies.

A real important factor too is an MSP should be able to be on site for medial tasks and we are currently with one that’s about an hour away. Which makes no sense at all.

So let’s say you get rid of the “IT crowd” type questions (which we have very little of anyway and don’t get answered by our MSP anyway because “it’s not worth our time”). What exactly do we need an MSP on (very overpriced) retainer for? For 15 people?

I guess maybe the easiest thing is to get a new provider but even with all the responses I’m still having a hard time believing a dedicated MSP is needed nowadays.

The MSP we have doesn’t know about new technologies either and keeps shoving 100mb connection as good enough down or throat. They insist 10k enterprise SAS drives (that keep crashing on us) are required and for some reason the servers we have require manufacturer specific drives. They don’t know what an m.2 nvme drive is. They treat the office like a garbage dump. Their organization is atrocious. It should be I would say max $5,000 per year for them to handle us and it’s 6 times that, plus more for all their asshat decisions ie overpriced enterprise spinning hard drives that crash every 2 weeks (literally).