Useful technology guidance for business leaders.
What to ask, what to check, and what usually goes wrong — written for the person signing the check, not the person running the cable.
How to Choose an MSP
Response time and monthly price are the easy questions. Ask who actually answers at 7pm and what their escalation path looks like. Ask whether monitoring, patching and after-hours work are included or billed separately — that gap is where surprise invoices live. Ask what happens to your documentation, licenses and admin credentials if you leave. A provider who cannot answer that last one is not managing your environment; they are holding it.
Cybersecurity Basics for Professional Services
Most breaches at firms this size are unglamorous. Multi-factor authentication on email and remote access closes the majority of them. Give administrators a separate account from the one they read mail with. Keep backups offsite and prove they work by restoring one, because an untested backup is a hope, not a control. Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC so nobody can send invoices in your name. Then review who has access to what — most firms discover former staff and old vendors still do.
Planning an Office Technology Upgrade
Start with the lease and the floor plan, not the equipment list. Cabling goes in before furniture and drywall, and moving it afterwards costs several times as much. Confirm power and cooling wherever the rack will live. Order the internet circuit early — carriers routinely quote 30 to 90 days, and it is the item most likely to delay a move. Decide cloud versus on-premises before buying hardware, and plan the cutover for a weekend with a tested way back.
What to Settle Before You Switch Providers
Leaving is where the real terms show. Before you sign with anyone, establish who owns the documentation, the domain, the license tenants and the administrator credentials — the answer should be you, in writing. Ask for an inventory of what you run and what each item costs; a provider who cannot produce one is not managing your environment. Give notice in writing, pay through the end of the term so nothing can be leveraged against you, and insist that credential handover happens on a supervised call rather than by email. Then change every shared credential, however amicable the parting was.
What You Are Actually Paying For in Software Licenses
Most firms buy the same subscriptions at list price, renew automatically, and never notice the seat count drifting. Start with an audit: how many licenses you pay for, how many are assigned, and how many belong to people who left. Check the tier — a mid-tier plan often includes security features you are separately paying a third party for. Buy annually where the commitment is genuine, and pay by ACH rather than card, because card processing on an annual licensing invoice is not a rounding error. Then put renewals on a calendar with a date to review, not just a date to pay.
Backups, and Why Most of Them Do Not Work
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a control. Confirm three things. That it covers what actually matters — cloud mail and file services included, because a subscription is not a backup. That at least one copy sits offsite and outside the reach of an account compromise. And that a real restore has been performed and timed within the last year. The number worth knowing is not how much data you hold; it is how long you would be down. Most businesses have never asked, and find out at the worst possible moment.
Are You Overpaying for Your Business Software? A 10-Minute Check
Most small businesses buy at list price, direct from the vendor, and never revisit the plan. The leaks are predictable: seats still billed for people who left, a tier chosen when the firm was smaller, and two tools doing the same job. Pull three months of card and bank statements, list every subscription with what it is for, how many people use it and which tier you are on, and mark any pair that overlaps. If you cannot name every subscription, or renewals are scattered across several cards, ad-hoc purchasing has outgrown you, and that is where a licensing review pays for itself.
Choosing a Password Manager for a Small Business
Most breaches at small firms start with a reused or guessed password, which makes a password manager the cheapest security upgrade you can buy. Choose a business plan, not a personal one, so an administrator can grant and revoke access as people join and leave. Turn on multi-factor authentication for the vault itself and make sure two administrators can recover it. Favor the tool your staff will actually use; a good browser extension matters more than a long feature list. Roll it out in stages: leadership and shared logins first, then team folders, then the hiring and exit procedures.