26 August 2026LANTEK Computers
Choosing an IT support company is a decision most business owners have to make without being able to evaluate the actual work. You cannot audit somebody’s patching discipline from a proposal. What you can do is ask questions whose answers reveal whether the discipline exists, and notice which ones make the room uncomfortable.
A note on geography before anything else, because it is the most common mistake in this decision. LANTEK does not have a Cape Town office. We work from Ballito in KwaZulu-Natal and Sandton in Gauteng, and we support clients across South Africa remotely. We have written this because the questions below are the same wherever you are, and because a provider being local is worth less than most people assume and more than nothing. Where it matters, we say so.
Separate responding from resolving
Almost every proposal quotes a response time. Very few quote anything about resolution, and responding to a problem is not the same as ending it. A fifteen minute response followed by three days of silence is a fifteen minute response.
Ask what a priority one incident is in their definition, and ask them to describe the last one they handled: what it was, how long it took, and what the client was told while it was open. A provider who runs a real service can answer that from memory.
Find out who is awake
Most of what damages a business happens outside office hours, because that is when nobody is looking. So the question is not whether they offer after-hours support, it is what is actively watched when the office is closed and who is authorised to act on it without waiting for permission.
There is a large difference between an alert being forwarded to you at three in the morning and an alert being dealt with at three in the morning. Ask which one you are buying.
Ask what they would find in your environment
This is the most revealing question in the list, and it costs nothing. Ask what they usually find wrong when they first look at a business like yours. A provider who does this work every week has a specific answer: multi-factor authentication on some accounts but not the dormant ones, legacy sign-in still enabled, four global administrators created for a project years ago, nothing backed up independently of Microsoft.
A vague answer means either they do not look, or they do not look at the things that matter. Both are useful to know.
Check whether security is inside the service
If cybersecurity appears as a separate proposal, ask what the support service does about a compromised mailbox. The answer tells you whether the two halves are joined. The incidents that actually hurt smaller businesses arrive through the identity that the support team already administers, so a provider who treats security as an upsell has drawn a line through the middle of the problem.
Ask who holds what. Certification is not the same as competence, but it is checkable, and a provider unwilling to say what their team holds is asking for a level of trust they have not earned. Ours is written down, and any certificate is available on request.
Read the exclusions, not the inclusions
The inclusions list is marketing. The exclusions list is the contract. Look for what happens with hardware failure, with projects, with new staff onboarding, with anything described as out of scope, and with work outside your stated hours. That is where the fixed monthly fee stops being fixed.
Also look for the minimum term and what notice looks like. A service confident in itself does not need to lock you in for three years.
Ask how you would leave
Ask on the first call. Every credential, licence record, configuration note and warranty position should be documented and handed over on request. Where it is not, you are not buying a service, you are lending somebody your environment.
What proximity actually buys
Monitoring, patching, identity work, mailbox investigations, backup verification and most incident response happen remotely and are unaffected by distance. What a nearby provider gives you is somebody able to stand in the room when hardware fails, when an office moves, or when a server will not come back. If your business depends on physical infrastructure on a single site, that is worth paying for locally.
If it does not, the more useful question is who answers, what they already know about your setup, and what happens at two in the morning. Those are answered the same way from anywhere.
The cheapest way to test any of it
A free IT audit and health check gives you an independent written view of your environment: the network, the computers, the Microsoft 365 tenant, the security controls and the backups, with a prioritised action plan and a free dark web exposure scan against your domain. You keep it whether you work with us or not, and it is written so that another provider could act on it.
That last part is deliberate. If your current provider is doing the job, the report will show it.