At Vertikal6, one of our core competencies is to Collaborate Feverishly. This includes our relationship with our peers, partners and our clients. One way we do this is to provide our clients with the information to make strategic technology decisions including the state of their network and all the access credentials they need to run their technology and ultimately their business (including domain registrar, website hosting account, firewall, server e-mail, etc.). While we do administer these accounts for our clients, we believe they should always have a list of these credentials in case they ever need to access these functions themselves. We believe this is paramount to building trust!
Whether you are a current Vertikal6 client, work with another IT provider, or you have an internal IT team – make sure you have the access to administer your technology on your own (even if you choose not too)! In addition, it’s critical to have a process in place that reminds your IT person or IT provider to alert you when a password has been changed. Here is a quick checklist of credentials you should have:
- Email Hosting Provider Admin Access –A tenured team member should be an admin of your email-hosting provider. This person should be someone that you trust to willingly provide you with the username and password information if they decide to leave your company.
- Company Server and/or Domain Admin Access – Be sure you have access to a user name and password for your server and/or domain. This will allow you or a new IT provider to access and manage these components.
- Internet Connection Admin – If your Internet goes down or you decide to switch your provider; this allows you to take care of it yourself. Anytime you call your ISP, you will need to provide your login information.
- Wireless Devices Portal Login – Ensure all your wireless devices are joined to your network, which gives you the power to manage them (i.e. blocking someone who expectantly leaves the company).
- Firewall Login –Having this login information allows you to prevent unauthorized access to your system – both in and out.
- Domain Name Registrar Login – Your website domain address should be owned by you or your company – not your webmaster or IT provider. If you were to sell your company, this is an asset, a tangible good.
- Website Hosting Account Login – Usually your website company will manage this relationsihp, which allows them the accessibility and immediate connectivity if/when there is a problem. You should still have the login information for emergencies.
Having control of your logins and passwords not only provides you with the “keys to your IT kingdom”, but allows you to easily provide this information to new IT providers or new internal IT team members as changes happen. Ultimately, you have the right to your own technology and your IT team (internal and external) should support that.