Guides & insights
Useful IT thinking. No technical fog.
Clear, practical guidance to help business leaders make better decisions about support, security, cloud and resilience.
Straight answers for business
Start with what matters now.
Short guides that make technical decisions easier to understand and discuss.
Five security foundations every small business should review
A practical starting point for identities, devices, data and people.
→Is your Microsoft 365 setup still fit for the business?
What to review as teams, licences and working practices change.
→A backup is not a recovery plan
The questions that turn stored data into business resilience.
→Cyber security guide
Five foundations worth reviewing first.
1. Protect identities. Use strong, unique sign-in practices and multi-factor authentication for important business systems.
2. Manage devices. Keep business devices updated, protected and visible rather than relying on users to handle everything.
3. Control access. Give people the access they need, remove it promptly when roles change and avoid shared administrator accounts.
4. Prepare your people. Staff need simple guidance for suspicious messages, unexpected requests and reporting mistakes quickly.
5. Plan recovery. Know what is backed up, how it is protected and how the business will restore operations.
Microsoft 365 guide
A cloud environment should not run itself.
Microsoft 365 changes as people join, leave, create teams and share information. Without deliberate administration, clutter and risk accumulate quietly.
Review users and licences
Check inactive accounts, role changes and whether licence choices still reflect what each person needs.
Review access and sharing
Look at privileged accounts, external guests, shared links and who owns important Teams or SharePoint sites.
Review security settings
Confirm strong authentication, email protection, device expectations and recovery contacts are still appropriate.
Review how people actually work
The best configuration supports current workflows, not the organisational chart from two years ago.
Backup & recovery guide
Stored data is not the same as a tested recovery.
Start by identifying the systems and information the business cannot operate without. Decide how much recent work you could afford to lose and how long each system can be unavailable.
Then ask where backups are stored, who can access or delete them, how failures are monitored and when a real restore was last tested. Those answers reveal whether the current arrangement is simply creating copies or supporting a usable recovery plan.
A good plan also covers people: who declares an incident, who contacts suppliers, what gets restored first and how staff will work while systems are unavailable.
Explore backup & recovery support