Many UK firms are playing Russian roulette with their choice of maintenance service provider, with two in five placing no import on technical accreditations.

Support services specialist Networks First surveyed senior management figures at 100 companies with upwards of 1,000 employees. Of the respondents, 13 revealed they are not focused on ascertaining the financial stability of prospective maintenance service providers.

Peter Titmus, managing director of Networks First, claimed assessing the solvency of service providers should be paramount for all firms.

"If your service provider goes out of business, it will make no difference if you have already paid for two years’ support, you could suddenly find yourself with none at all, " he added.

Industry accreditations, for both individual engineers and the company as a whole, were rated as important or very important by 61 per cent of respondents. This means 39 per cent are unconcerned by such accreditations, with a further 45 per cent not interested in security standards, such as ISO 27001 and 9001.

Customer references were of little significance to 38 per cent of firms while 62 per cent did not consider whether potential service providers had access to technical assistance from manufacturers.

“Without manufacturer-backed technical assistance support, you cannot be sure your equipment is fully registered and therefore meeting legal requirements," said Titmus. "It also puts you at risk of not getting the appropriate technical updates as they become available or having the necessary support when required.

"UK businesses really need to be thinking about how critical they consider their IT networks and putting far more emphasis on due diligence in this area. Too many companies rely on contracts to protect them when in fact the actual protection is minimal."

Titmus added: "The penalties in contracts fade into insignificance if the service actually provided is well below the expected standard because the real cost of downtime is huge compared to the penalties paid for poor performance."