Summary: Most MSP comparisons collapse into price-per-user—and that number hides everything that determines whether you get an accountable partner or a distant ticket queue. Here are the twelve questions we tell Houston businesses to ask every provider they evaluate, including ECS. For a printable version with strong-answer and red-flag examples, grab the MSP evaluation scorecard.
Accountability questions
- 1. Who actually answers when something breaks? A named team you'll recognize, or whoever picks up at a national queue? Ask to meet the engineers before signing.
- 2. Where are your engineers physically located? "Local presence" often means a sales office. Onsite response time depends on where the actual bench sits—ours is in Stafford, minutes from Sugar Land and southwest Houston.
- 3. What does your escalation path look like in writing? Strong answer: documented tiers with time expectations in the agreement. Red flag: "we treat everything as urgent."
- 4. Who owns our documentation if we leave? Runbooks, passwords, network maps—if the answer isn't "you do, always," you're evaluating a hostage-taker, not a partner.
Security questions
- 5. What security work is inside the monthly fee vs. sold separately? Patching cadence, identity hardening, and backup testing belong in the base. Red flag: security exists only as an add-on menu.
- 6. When was your last assessment of a client environment—and what did the deliverable look like? Ask to see a redacted vulnerability assessment report. Raw scanner exports are a red flag.
- 7. How do you handle cyber-insurance questionnaires? A partner fills them out with you from documented evidence; a vendor forwards them back to you.
- 8. What happens in the first 48 hours of an incident? Listen for containment, tested restores, and insurer coordination—not "we'd escalate to our security team."
Partnership questions
- 9. What does a quarterly review actually contain? Strong answer: risk register, roadmap progress, budget outlook—vCIO-grade planning. Red flag: ticket counts and a renewal pitch.
- 10. Can you work alongside our internal IT? Co-managed delivery with written ownership boundaries is a maturity signal even if you don't need it yet.
- 11. What is scoped as a project vs. included? Get the boundary in writing before you sign—this is where surprise invoices live.
- 12. Why did your last client leave? Every honest MSP has an answer. Evasion is the answer.
Scoring it
Take the scorecard version into every sales conversation and score each provider 1–5 per question. Anyone who resists being scored has told you what you need to know. When you're ready, put ECS on the sheet—we'll answer all twelve in the first call, and compare notes against our published package structure.
