It might sound counterintuitive, but an internal assessment is always the best place to start. If you don’t know at least some of what you need going into your selection process, you’ll have a hard time picking a provider who can meet your needs. Granted, if you don’t have any IT staff, that can feel like an impossible step.
Don’t focus on the technology. Instead, focus on your pain points. What do you want to do but can’t? What can you do now that you wish worked better, faster, or both? For example, do you create local backups on portable drives but wish there was a better way? Cloud backups can make that process automatic.
Do you wish that you could run more computers or have more cash registers without the expense of buying high-end equipment? Virtualization can let you run your operating system, software, and even a POS system from the cloud.
Even if you aren’t an IT expert but know the problems you need to solve, it gives you a list of topics to ask a managed services provider. If they can’t solve all the problems on your list, you need a different MSP.