IT outsourcing customers have been given guidelines on the rights and expectations when it comes to the provision of tech maintenance.

The code of conduct, drawn up by the Gartner Global IT Council for IT Maintenance, includes seven rights of customers.

“Organisations need timely, reliable, cost-effective IT maintenance, but they just aren’t getting it,” said David Cappuccio, vice-president and chief of research at Gartner.

“On the one hand, hardware and software maintenance represents the single largest IT expense for many organisations, but it’s also a huge source of revenue for IT vendors.”

According to Gartner, customers have the right to regular updates to security products, clearly-defined response times and the ability to end support at any time for product no longer in use.

In addition, they have the right to predictable levels of support through a contract lifestyle and to explicit statement and approval of support details at the line-item level.

Recently, Gartner published similar guidelines for cloud computing services customers.