What should your IT provider be checking when you aren't looking?
A practical list of the quiet, unglamorous checks that decide whether your technology holds up. Use it to audit whoever looks after yours.
Every day
Backups: did last night's job finish, and did it finish cleanly? A job that 'ran' and a job that captured your data are not the same thing, and the difference is only visible if somebody reads the result.
Alerts: anything offline, any failed drive, any machine out of disk space, any service that stopped. The value isn't the alert, it's whether a human acted on it.
Security detections: anything quarantined, any blocked sign-in, any impossible-travel login. The earlier these are looked at, the smaller they stay.
Every month
Patching: operating systems and the applications that are actually exposed — browsers, PDF readers, Office. Including the machine that someone leaves switched off for three weeks at a time.
Microsoft 365 configuration: new accounts, old accounts that should be gone, mail forwarding rules nobody set deliberately, multi-factor coverage, admin role sprawl.
Network device firmware and configuration backups, so a failed firewall is a replacement rather than a reconstruction.
Every quarter
A restore test. Not a check that the backup exists, but an actual recovery of a file and, periodically, of a system. Untested backups fail at precisely the moment they matter.
Hardware lifecycle: what's out of warranty, what's slowing down, which batteries have stopped holding charge, which drives are reporting errors. This is where replacement stops being an emergency.
Licence and subscription review: what you're paying for, who's using it, what can be dropped. This frequently pays for part of the support itself.
Every year
A documentation refresh so what's written down matches what's installed. A continuity conversation: what would it actually take to keep trading if the office or the server went away? And a review of where the business is heading, because IT bought for the business you were is rarely right for the one you're becoming.
How to use this list
Send it to your provider and ask which of these they do, how often, and how you'd know. You're not looking for a perfect score — you're looking for honest answers and a schedule. A provider who says 'we check backups when we're in' is describing hope, not maintenance.
Universal Support puts each of these on a schedule, with the results written down and reviewed with you rather than kept in a technician's head.
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