Switching IT providers
Most of the pain in changing IT companies is not technical. It is discovering, three weeks in, that something you assumed you owned is registered to someone else.
This page is written to be used by the business doing the switching, not by either provider. Work through it while you still have a relationship with the outgoing one. Everything here is easier to obtain from a provider who is still being paid.
Who actually changes provider
Managed service providers describing where their new clients come from.
- 33%
- say most new clients are switching from another provider
- 49%
- see a mix of switchers and first-time buyers
- 12%
- say most new clients are outsourcing IT for the first time
Source: Kaseya 2026 State of the MSP Report , Figure 4.
Start here
Before you give notice
Three checks decide how hard a switch will be, and all three can be done today without telling anyone.
Your contract
Find the termination clause. Write down the end date, the notice period, and what the agreement says comes back to you.
Your domain
Log in to the registrar yourself. If you cannot, or the registrant is your provider, settle that now. Email stops with the domain.
Your tenant
Your company should hold at least one Global Administrator account in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace that is not your provider's. Asking for one is normal.
The review below goes further. It asks fifteen questions about what your provider gives you, and every one of them maps to a published outcome in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. The result is a governance finding you can take to your own management rather than a complaint about service.
Self-assessment
Is your IT provider doing the job?
Fifteen questions about what your current IT provider gives you, each mapped to a NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 outcome. This checks whether the basics of provider oversight are in place; it is not an audit of your provider and it does not assess your security posture.
What this means
Gaps to close
This is a self-assessment, not an audit or a compliance opinion. Nothing you entered was sent anywhere or saved.
Talk through these gaps with an engineerHandover
What to get back
An outgoing provider who is professional hands all of this over without argument, and many do. If yours resists, that resistance is itself information about the relationship you are leaving.
Credentials and ownership
- Domain registrar login, with the registrant listed as your company
- DNS hosting access, wherever the records actually live
- A Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace Global Administrator account your company holds
- Local administrator credentials for servers and workstations
- Firewall and switch administrative access
- Wi-Fi controller access
- Backup system console access
- Remote access and VPN administration
- Line-of-business application administrator accounts
- Any password manager vault, exported in a portable format
For each item, confirm the account is in your own name. Access granted through a provider's tenant disappears when the relationship does.
Licenses and subscriptions
- A list of every subscription, showing the license holder and renewal date
- Microsoft or Google licenses moved into your own tenant where they sit in a provider's
- Antivirus, EDR and email security subscriptions, with ownership confirmed
- Backup software or storage subscriptions
- Any hardware still under lease or finance, with the agreement itself
Licenses bought through a provider's agreement are often not transferable. Find out which ones before you move.
Documentation
- Current network diagram
- Hardware inventory with serial numbers, warranty status and location
- Software and systems inventory
- IP addressing scheme and VLAN layout
- Firewall rule base, with the non-obvious rules explained
- Backup configuration: what is backed up, how often, where it goes, how long it is kept
- The most recent successful restore test result
- Standard operating procedures for anything specific to your business
- A list of every third party with access to your systems, and why
Ask for it in a format you can read without the provider's tooling. A documentation platform you lose access to at termination is not documentation you have.
Data
- Confirmation of where every copy of your data physically resides
- A current backup copy in your own possession, verified as restorable
- Email archives and journaling, if either is in use
- File shares, including any sitting in a provider's cloud
- A written statement of what the outgoing provider will delete, and when
You are entitled to know when copies of your data stop existing on someone else's systems. If you are regulated, you may be obliged to know.
Operational
- Open ticket list at the point of handover
- Known outstanding problems, including anything deferred or accepted as a risk
- Vendor support contracts and the account numbers to use them
- Maintenance and renewal calendar for the next twelve months
- Any monitoring or alerting that needs to be pointed somewhere new
Without this, week one with a new provider is spent finding out what you already paid someone else to know.
Failure modes
Three things that go wrong most often
01
The domain
It is the one item that stops email, and it is the one most often registered to a provider rather than to the business. Check it first.
02
The Microsoft 365 tenant
If the tenant was created under a provider's partner agreement and you hold no Global Administrator account, you depend on their cooperation to move. Settle this before notice is served.
03
Undocumented work
Scripts, integrations and one-off fixes that live in an engineer's head and nowhere else. Ask what exists that is not documented, and get it written down while someone still remembers it.
Common questions
Changing provider
Don't see yours? Call (714) 694-4573 or email contact@advran.com.
Should I tell my current provider that I am looking? +
Not before you have checked who owns your domain, your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant, and your licenses. Everything on the handover list is easier to obtain from a provider who is still being paid. You also do not need to explain why you are asking. Updating your supplier records is a sufficient and accurate reason.
What if I am in the middle of a contract? +
Read the termination clause and write down three things: the end date, the notice period, and what the agreement says is returned to you on termination. If the agreement is silent on what gets returned, assume nothing is, and ask for it in writing before you serve notice. Work out the cost of any overlap early. It is a poor thing to discover at signature.
How long does a handover take? +
The limiting factor is almost never the technical work. It is how much documentation exists and who holds which account. A business with a current network diagram, an owned tenant and a known license position moves quickly. A business that has to reconstruct all three first does not. That is why the questions on this page ask about records and ownership.
Will my email go down? +
Only if the domain or the tenant is not under your control at cutover. Email follows the domain, so a domain registered to your provider is the single most disruptive thing to recover. Verify that you can log in to the registrar yourself before anything else happens.
Do I have to move everything at once? +
No. Monitoring, endpoint security, backup and help desk can be taken over in stages, and staging reduces the risk of a single bad weekend. What does need to be settled up front is ownership: domain, tenant and licenses. Those determine what is even possible afterwards.
What does AdVran need in order to quote? +
A device and user count, where your sites are, what compliance obligations apply, and whatever documentation you already hold. If the documentation does not exist, say so. That is a common answer. Call (714) 694-4573 or email contact@advran.com.
Bring us what you found
If the review above produced a list of gaps, that list is the agenda for a first conversation. We serve Orange County, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and Ventura County from Anaheim, with 24/7/365 SOC and critical support.