First, a fair word for the people who keep small businesses working. A good IT partner is worth every penny: they fix the printer, they get the new laptop set up, they answer the phone when nothing works and a deadline is looming. Most of the ones we meet are conscientious and know their patch well. So when we point at gaps, we are not pointing at incompetence. We are pointing at a job description that never included the things below.

The first gap is offboarding. Keeping accounts working is the brief; switching them off when someone leaves usually is not, unless somebody remembers to raise a ticket. The second is tested backups. Plenty of partners set up a backup and monitor that it runs. Far fewer are asked to prove they can restore from it, because a restore test costs time nobody has budgeted for.

The third is second factor across the board, not just on email. It is common to find it switched on for the main mailbox and missing from the accounting software, the domain registrar and the remote-access tool. The fourth is who owns the domain and the DNS. We regularly find these registered under a personal account of someone who left, or under the IT firm's own login, which becomes a problem the day you want to change supplier.

The fifth is plain-language reporting to you, the owner. A good technical partner can tell you the servers are patched. Fewer will tell you, in a sentence you can act on, what your biggest risk is this quarter and what it would cost to close it. That translation is a separate skill, and it is usually nobody's contracted responsibility.

None of this is a case for sacking your IT provider. It is a case for asking them five specific questions, and for being willing to pay for the hour it takes to answer them properly. The best partners welcome that, because it lets them do work they already knew was worth doing.