What a good quarterly business review covers is one article; this is its companion from your side of the table — the ten questions worth asking whoever runs your IT, every quarter, whatever they’ve prepared. They take fifteen minutes, they require zero technical knowledge, and they work on any provider (including us — clients who arrive with this list get better service, which is rather the point of publishing it). For each: the question, and what a good answer sounds like.
1. “When did we last successfully restore something, and how long did it take?” Good answer: a date within the quarter and a stopwatch number. Bad answer: “backups are running fine” — that’s job status, not recovery proof.
2. “Which of our accounts don’t have MFA, and why does each exception exist?” Good answer: a short, named, shrinking list. The exceptions are where the risk lives, and a provider who can’t produce the list isn’t tracking it.
3. “What’s our biggest single point of failure right now, and what would fixing it cost?” The question that reveals whether anyone is thinking about your environment versus just servicing it. Every environment has an answer; “nothing really” means nobody’s looked.
4. “What did you prevent this quarter?” Monitoring catches, patches applied, alerts investigated, the failing drive replaced before it failed — prevention is most of what a managed fee buys, and this question makes the invisible work visible. A provider with nothing to report here is reactive with a monthly invoice.
5. “What’s aging out in the next twelve months, and what should we budget?” Good answer: specific machines with dates and numbers, feeding your budget. This is the question that kills surprise capital spending.
6. “Show me our response-time performance this quarter.” Not the SLA table — the actuals against it. Providers who publish their own numbers to you rarely have numbers worth hiding.
7. “What keeps recurring, and what’s the permanent fix?” The pattern question: the printer that gets fixed monthly is a subscription to a problem. Good answer: named recurring issues with root-cause fixes proposed, priced, or done.
8. “If our insurer audited our application today, what would fail?” Blunt on purpose. The application made promises; the honest gap list — ideally empty, realistically short — is one of the most valuable answers a provider can give, precisely because it costs them comfort to give it.
9. “What are we paying for that you’d cut?” The trust barometer. Licenses, tools, services — every environment accumulates some; a provider who names savings against their own convenience has aligned with you. Quarters of “nothing, it’s all essential” deserve an eyebrow.
10. “What are businesses like ours doing that we’re not?” The forward-looking closer — it surfaces the roadmap thinking if it exists, and its absence if it doesn’t.
How to use the list
Three habits make it work. Ask in writing or in the standing meeting, consistently — the value compounds when providers know the questions are coming, because the environment gets managed to them (which is the whole trick: these ten questions quietly enforce the leadership metrics without a dashboard). Log the answers — one page per quarter; trends matter more than snapshots, and “same single point of failure, fourth consecutive quarter” is a finding about the relationship, not the network. Grade candor over comfort — the provider who answers #8 with a real gap and #9 with a real cut is worth more than the one whose every answer is green; in this business, the honest ugly number is the premium product.
And if the questions can’t be answered at all — no restore dates, no MFA list, no numbers — you haven’t learned that your provider is evil; you’ve learned the relationship may be sized for a smaller company than you’ve become. That’s worth knowing in fifteen minutes a quarter.
The bottom line
Ten questions, fifteen minutes, no technical knowledge required: proof of recovery, the MFA exceptions, the biggest risk, the prevented problems, the aging list, the real response times, the recurring issues, the insurance gaps, the recommended cuts, and the look ahead. Ask them every quarter and log the answers — accountability this cheap is rare, and any provider worth keeping will thank you for the list. And if you want an even shorter companion for judging a local provider, the five-minute test pairs well with these ten.