Summary: Three to five years is a practical replacement range for many business computers. The right time depends on security support, reliability, performance, warranty coverage, repair costs, and the employee’s work. Replace any computer that cannot run a supported operating system or…
IT Management
Small Business IT Budget: What to Include and How to Plan It
Summary: Your IT budget should include the technology you already use, the support required to maintain it, and the upgrades you expect to make during the year. It should also cover cybersecurity, backups, employee changes, planned projects, and a reserve for urgent…
Should Employees Use Personal Devices for Work?
Reading Time: 11 minutes Summary: Allow personal devices only for approved work, through approved apps, and when the device meets your security requirements. Use company-owned devices for administration, sensitive work, or jobs that require large amounts of data to be stored locally.…
Why Your Employees Shouldn’t Have Administrator Access to Their Computers
Reading Time: 9 minutes Summary: Employees should use standard accounts for email, web browsing, and everyday work. Administrator access should be limited to approved IT tasks and protected with a separate account. Administrator access often starts with one request. An employee needs…
The 30-Minute IT Check Every Small Business Should Do Once a Month
Reading Time: 6 minutes Summary: Most IT problems don’t appear out of nowhere. Backups quietly stop running, updates sit unfinished for weeks, and old staff accounts stay switched on for months. A short check once a month catches these while they’re still…
Why Bad Onboarding Is the Real Cause of Messy Offboarding
Reading Time: 10 minutes By the time an employee hands in their notice, the decisions that will make their departure clean or messy have already been made. They were made in the first weeks of the person’s tenure, when nobody was paying…
What Immutable Backup Means on Your Cyber Insurance Form
Reading Time: 8 minutes Cyber insurance applications include a question that catches a lot of small business owners off guard: “Do you maintain immutable, air-gapped, or offline backups of your critical business data?” Carriers added that question to renewal forms because ransomware…
The “Zombie” SaaS Audit: Finding the 3 Apps Your Former Employees Still Access
Reading Time: 4 minutes Someone leaves the company on a Friday. By Monday, their email account is disabled, and their laptop is back in the pile. What nobody checks is their login to the project management tool they signed up for in…
Stop the Bleeding: How Revoking Admin Rights Eliminates Support Tickets
Reading Time: 5 minutes The most time-consuming ticket in your queue is rarely a hardware failure. It’s the PC infection that started when a user installed something they shouldn’t have been able to. Or it’s the broken configuration left behind after someone…
The “Legacy Debt” Audit: Identifying the 3 Oldest Risks in Your Server Room
Reading Time: 5 minutes The most dangerous thing in a server room is often the phrase, “Don’t touch that.” It’s usually said with a half-joke and a grimace. It refers to the old box that “still works”, runs something important, and has…