Written by SONNY SEHGAL | CEO
Most businesses do not decide to switch MSP providers because of one dramatic failure. They decide because the small things stop improving. Tickets take longer than they used to. The monthly report says everything is green while the users say otherwise. Nobody from the provider has suggested anything new in a year.
Deciding to move is the easy part. The handover is the hard part, and it is almost never a technology problem. It is an access and information problem. Who holds the administrator credentials, who owns the licences, where the documentation lives, and whether any of it comes back to you when the contract ends.
This guide covers the whole move in the order you will need it. What to check before you give notice, what you are entitled to get back, how the Microsoft 365 partner transfer actually works, what to do when an outgoing provider goes quiet, and the five stages Transputec uses to take over a live estate without an outage. It is written for the person who has to run the transition rather than the person who signs it off.
What to Check Before You Give Notice
Read the contract before you tell anyone you intend to switch MSP. Three clauses decide how strong your position is for everything that follows.
The notice period and the renewal date. Managed services agreements commonly auto renew, and the window to serve notice is often narrower than the notice period itself. Find the renewal date, find the number of days required, and work backwards. Miss the window and you are committed for another term.
The exit clause. Look for what the provider owes you when the contract ends. Documentation, configuration exports, a knowledge transfer session, support through a handover period. If the contract says nothing, you are relying on goodwill. Look for offboarding or de-installation fees too, which are far easier to negotiate before you give notice than after.
Who owns what. Licences bought through your provider may sit under their agreement rather than yours. The same goes for monitoring agents, backup repositories, remote access tooling and, surprisingly often, your domain name. List every asset that holds your data and note whose name is on the account.
Two legal points are worth knowing before the first conversation.
Your provider processes personal data on your behalf, which makes them a processor and your business the controller. UK GDPR sets out what the contract between you has to contain. Under Article 28(3)(g) it must require the processor, at your choice, to delete or return all the personal data it has been processing for you, and to delete existing copies unless UK law requires them to be kept. Article 28(3)(h) requires them to give you the information needed to show those obligations have been met, and to allow for and contribute to audits. The ICO sets this out in its guidance on what needs to be included in the contract. If your current agreement is missing those clauses, that is a finding in itself.
If people move with the work, TUPE may apply. GOV.UK describes a service provision change as covering a service being awarded to a contractor, a contract passing to a new contractor, or work being brought back in house. Only employees who can be clearly identified as providing the transferred service are protected. Most MSP changes involve no staff transfer at all, but if your provider has people assigned solely to your account, or you are bringing the work in house, take advice before serving notice.
Transputec runs this review with clients before a date is committed, because the contract usually sets the timetable for everything else.
What You Must Get Back From Your Current Provider
A handover is a list of artefacts, not a meeting. Ask for these in writing, with a date against each one.
- Administrative credentials for every system, including break glass accounts
- Global administrator access to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant, held by someone who works for you
- Control of the domain at the registrar, plus the current DNS zone file
- Licence inventory: what you hold, how many, when each term ends, and whose agreement they sit under
- Backup configuration, retention settings, and a restore test you can witness
- Firewall, switch and VPN configurations, exported
- The asset register: hardware, serial numbers, warranty end dates, and who has which device
- Network and systems documentation, including whatever the service desk uses to resolve your tickets
- Open and recently closed tickets, so the new provider inherits the context rather than just the queue
- Third party contracts and support agreements held in the provider’s name on your behalf
- A list of monitoring and remote access agents that will need removing afterwards
That last point matters more than it looks. When a contract ends, the outgoing provider’s tooling is usually still installed and still connected. Decide who removes it, then verify that it has gone.
Two items on the list are where most attempts to switch MSP stall. Global administrator access is the first. The domain registrar is the second. If a provider holds your domain in their own account, you cannot move email without them. Check both now rather than in week three.
Build this list before you switch MSP, not after. Transputec treats the artefact list as the first deliverable of a transition rather than a closing formality, which is why discovery comes before any date is agreed.
How to Switch MSP Providers in Five Stages
Every transition Transputec runs follows the same five stages. The names matter less than the order, and the order exists because each stage removes a risk the next one would otherwise inherit.
1. Discovery. The incoming provider documents what you actually have, rather than what the last provider’s inventory claims. Expect a network scan, a licence reconciliation, an asset count and a read of your ticket history. Discovery nearly always finds something nobody knew about. An unpatched server. A backup that has not completed in months. A shared administrator account used by four people.
2. Contract and notice. With discovery done you know what the new service has to cover, so the new agreement can be written against reality instead of assumption. Serve notice only once that agreement is signed and the start date is fixed, and overlap the two contracts deliberately.
3. Parallel running. For a defined period both providers are live. The new provider deploys monitoring, backup and remote support tooling and takes a share of the tickets while the old provider is still contractually responsible. This is the stage people try to skip to save a month of fees. It is also the stage that prevents the outage.
4. Cutover. Service desk contact details change, ticket routing changes, the new provider takes full responsibility, and the old provider’s access is revoked on a date you control. Revocation is a security event rather than an administrative one. Do it deliberately, confirm it, and keep the record.
5. The first ninety days. Agree what success looks like before the move, then measure it. Response and resolution times, ticket volume by category, the state of patching, and whether the backlog discovery uncovered is actually being worked through.
Six to twelve weeks from discovery to cutover is realistic for a mid sized estate, and the notice period is usually the longest single item. Businesses that try to switch MSP inside a fortnight tend to end up running two providers for three months anyway, without the benefit of having planned it.
Planning a move away from your current IT provider?
Talk to our team about the handover work behind a Transputec Managed IT Services transition.
Transferring Microsoft 365 and Azure to a New Partner
If your licences are bought through your provider under the Cloud Solution Provider programme, moving them is a defined process with one awkward dependency. Your outgoing provider has to press the button.
Microsoft’s documentation sets out the sequence. You accept a reseller relationship request from the new partner, which is what allows them to send a transfer request to your current partner. The new partner creates and sends that request. Your current partner then opens it, selects the subscriptions and submits it, and that submission is what actually moves them. Microsoft states plainly that target partners create and send transfer requests for the source partner to define, approve and submit.
The details worth planning around, all from Microsoft’s transfer documentation:
- A transfer request that nobody acts on expires after 30 days
- Transfers take up to 72 hours to complete
- The transfer creates a new subscription under the new partner with a new subscription ID, while properties such as user counts and renewal settings are preserved
- One request can carry a maximum of 25 licence based line items per billing plan, so a larger estate has to be split across several
- There is no new cancellation window, because a transferred subscription is not treated as a new term
None of that moves your data. Your tenant, your mailboxes and your files stay exactly where they are. What changes is who bills you and who holds delegated administrative access to the tenant. Review that access as a separate item: the new partner will request delegated administrator privileges, and the old partner’s should be removed once the transfer completes.
Azure subscriptions follow a different route from licence based subscriptions, so treat them as a separate workstream rather than assuming one request covers everything.
Transputec handles the partner side of this as part of our Microsoft 365 managed services. The sequencing matters: if you serve notice before the relationship request is accepted, you are asking a provider you have just given notice to for a favour.
When Your Current Provider Will Not Hand Over Access
This is the scenario nobody plans for and it is common enough to plan for. Start by separating what you are entitled to from what you need cooperation for.
You are entitled to your personal data. UK GDPR requires the contract to make your provider, at your choice, delete or return all the personal data it processes for you, and delete existing copies unless the law requires otherwise. If the contract omits that, the omission is a compliance problem for both sides. Put the request in writing, name the specific systems and artefacts, and set a date against each.
You need cooperation for the Microsoft transfer. The outgoing partner has to submit it, and the request simply expires after 30 days if they leave it. Build that dependency into the timetable rather than discovering it in the final week.
What you can do without them is more than most people assume. You can create and own a new tenant. You can take control of the domain if the registrar account is in your name. You can rebuild documentation from the estate itself through discovery. You can stand up new monitoring, new backup and a new service desk in parallel. The slow path is rebuilding what a cooperative handover would have produced in an afternoon, but it is a path, and knowing that changes how the conversation goes.
Three habits mean you never reach this point the next time you switch MSP. Hold your own global administrator account from day one. Keep the domain in your own registrar account. Ask for the artefact list annually rather than at the end, so handover material exists before anyone needs it.
If you are already in this position, the practical order is a written request with dates, escalation through the contract, a parallel build of anything you cannot obtain, then a hard revocation of all remaining access at cutover. Transputec has taken over estates where the previous handover amounted to a spreadsheet, and the discovery stage is what makes that survivable.
Where Transitions Go Wrong
Four failure modes account for most of the trouble.
The gap at cutover. Both providers believe the other is covering Friday night. Name one responsible party for every hour of the transition, in writing, and make sure both providers have seen it.
Access that is never revoked. Old agents, old VPN accounts, old service accounts and old delegated administrator relationships survive the end of a contract routinely. Produce the list during discovery, revoke on a named date, and verify afterwards. It is the most common security finding after a provider change.
A change freeze that never happens. Migrations and projects running through a transition make it impossible to tell whether a new problem came from the move or from the project. Freeze non essential change from a week before cutover until the service is stable.
Documentation debt. If the outgoing provider’s documentation was thin, the incoming provider is writing it from scratch while also absorbing the tickets. Budget for that, and treat the documentation as a deliverable with a date rather than something that accumulates.
The pattern is the same in all four. The technical work in a decision to switch MSP is modest. The risk sits in the handover, the access and the accountability, which is why Transputec front loads discovery and runs both providers in parallel instead of cutting over on a single night.
How Transputec Runs an MSP Transition
Transputec has taken over live estates from incumbent providers for more than thirty years, and the method has not changed much because the failure modes have not changed much.
Discovery comes first, and it is not a sales exercise. We document the estate, reconcile the licences, read the ticket history and test the backups before a transition date is agreed, because the contract should describe the service you need rather than the service the last provider sold.
The service runs through our Managed IT Services and Managed IT Service Desk, with 24/7 cover where the business needs it. Both providers stay live in parallel through the handover, and the outgoing provider’s access is revoked on a named date with the evidence recorded.
We also publish the thing customers actually care about. Transputec’s customer satisfaction data is refreshed monthly, and our Net Promoter Score has consistently sat in the world class band above 70 against a typical cross industry average of around 31. We contract on experience level agreements as well as service levels, because a ticket closed inside SLA that left the user stuck is not a success.
Two transitions on this site show the shape of the work. For World Rugby, which links 132 national member federations, we ran a methodical discovery and handover across end user support, infrastructure and AWS services, and now provide 24/7 managed services spanning hybrid cloud and infrastructure. The engagement is described as a zero disruption transition. For Gore Street Capital, we assessed the environment, deployed monitoring and moved services across without interrupting operations.
If you are weighing up whether to switch MSP this year, the useful first conversation is not about price. It is about what your current provider holds that you would need back.
Switching provider this year?
Transputec takes over live estates with a discovery first transition and a documented handover. Talk to our team about the Managed IT Services work behind it.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How long does it take to switch MSP providers?
Six to twelve weeks from discovery to cutover is realistic for a mid sized estate, and the notice period in your existing contract is usually the longest single item. Discovery takes one to three weeks, parallel running is typically four to six weeks, and cutover itself is a day. Larger or more regulated estates take longer, mostly because licence reconciliation and documentation take longer. The same applies if you are migrating from one MSP to another part way through a contract term. The Microsoft subscription transfer is not the constraint: it completes within 72 hours once your outgoing partner submits it, although the request expires if they leave it for 30 days.
2. Can we keep our current MSP for some services and use another provider?
Yes, and plenty of businesses do. A common split is one provider for end user support and another for security monitoring, or an incumbent kept for a legacy application while a new provider takes everything else. It works when the boundary is written down: who owns which systems, who holds which administrator rights, who is accountable for an incident that crosses the line, and how the two raise tickets with each other. It fails when the boundary is assumed. Define the escalation path between the two providers before you start, because that is the gap incidents fall into.
3. What happens to our Microsoft 365 licences when we switch MSP?
Your tenant, mailboxes and files stay exactly where they are. What moves is the billing relationship and the delegated administrative access. You accept a reseller relationship request from the new partner, the new partner sends a transfer request, and your current partner has to approve and submit it. Microsoft’s documentation states that the transfer creates a new subscription with a new subscription ID while properties such as user counts and renewal settings are preserved, that one request can carry a maximum of 25 licence based line items per billing plan, and that an unanswered request expires after 30 days. Azure subscriptions move through a separate process.
4. Does TUPE apply when we change IT provider?
It can. GOV.UK describes a service provision change as including a service being awarded to a contractor, a contract passing to a new contractor, or work being brought back in house, and all three can be a TUPE transfer. Only employees who can be clearly identified as providing the transferred service are protected, so a provider’s shared service desk staff are usually out of scope while someone dedicated full time to your account may not be. Most MSP changes involve no staff transfer at all. If your provider has named people assigned solely to you, or you are insourcing the work, take employment advice before serving notice.
5. What if our current provider refuses to hand over administrator access?
Separate what you are entitled to from what needs their cooperation. UK GDPR requires the contract to make your provider delete or return the personal data it processes for you, at your choice, and delete existing copies unless the law requires otherwise, so put a written request in naming specific systems and dates. The Microsoft subscription transfer does need them to act, and the request expires after 30 days if they do not. Everything else can be rebuilt: a new tenant, domain control through your own registrar account, documentation reconstructed from the estate during discovery, and new monitoring, backup and service desk tooling stood up in parallel. It costs time rather than being impossible, which is why holding your own global administrator account and your own domain registration from day one is worth the small amount of effort.
