Industries
Small Businesses
Under about twenty people there is usually no IT person, and the role has quietly landed on whoever is best with computers — often the owner, usually at the worst possible moment.
What makes this different
The problems specific to your sector
Not a generic list. These are the things that come up repeatedly in this kind of business.
The owner is the IT department
Password resets, the printer, the new starter's laptop and the thing that stopped working this morning all arrive at the person who should be running the business.
Nobody knows what would happen if a laptop died today
Backups are assumed rather than verified. The honest answer to whether last week's work could be restored is usually that nobody has ever tried.
Being small is not being uninteresting
Attacks are automated and indiscriminate. Small businesses get hit because they are reachable and under-defended, not because anybody chose them.
Advice usually arrives with something to sell attached
It is hard to tell a genuine recommendation from a product being pushed when you have nobody independent to ask.
Compliance
What you are actually required to do
Named obligations rather than the word 'compliance'. If one of these does not apply to you, we will say so.
Sector rules still apply
PCI DSS if you take cards, HIPAA if you handle health data, and Florida breach notification regardless of size.
Cyber insurance conditions
Small policies increasingly require MFA and endpoint protection to be in place before a claim is paid.
Your software
We expect to find these
We work around your line-of-business software rather than asking you to change it, and we deal with the vendor when needed.
- Microsoft 365
- Accounting software
- Payment processing
- Industry-specific applications
Recommended
Where we would start
Managed IT Services
Proactive monitoring, patching and unlimited help desk for a flat monthly fee — so problems are fixed before they reach your staff.
Microsoft 365 Security
The tenant settings that decide whether a stolen password becomes an incident — reviewed, tightened and documented.
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Backups that are tested on a schedule, with a recovery time you have actually seen demonstrated — not assumed.
IT Consulting & Technology Planning
A written technology roadmap and budget, so replacing your server is a planned expense rather than an emergency.
Questions
Common questions
Are we too small to be worth managing?
No. A five-person business with Microsoft 365, a couple of laptops and a card terminal has the same categories of risk as a fifty-person one, with less margin for a bad week. What changes with size is scope, not whether it is worth doing.
We only need help occasionally. Do we have to sign a monthly agreement?
No. Project and hourly work is available and appropriate for some businesses. Where a monthly agreement genuinely is better value we will show you the arithmetic rather than assert it.
What is the single most valuable thing we could do?
Turn on MFA everywhere and verify that your backups actually restore. If you do nothing else this year, do those two — and neither requires hiring anyone.
Ready to secure your business?
A free assessment: we review your network, backups, Microsoft 365 settings and exposure, then hand you the findings in writing — whether or not you hire us.