How much to spend on IT, when to replace hardware, and when to bring in outside help — for the owner or manager making the technology decisions.
Someone on your team works from home two days a week, connects to the office VPN, and never thinks twice about it. Same setup for years — log in, green padlock, done. And it’s exactly the kind of setup attackers have been going after hardest. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security keeps putting out the … Read more
Every office has one. The computer that takes ten minutes to be usable in the morning, so its owner turns it on and goes to make coffee. The one where everyone knows you don’t open the big spreadsheet and Teams at the same time. Nobody replaces it, because it still works — and spending money … Read more
We often get this call. A client phones us and it’s urgent — one of their employees has been working from home for months, and now something isn’t working. Email won’t connect, access to the shared drive is gone, video calls keep dropping. No one has ever actually looked at the employee’s home setup. It … Read more
Every few months, someone asks me some version of this question. Sometimes it comes from a business owner who just got hit with an unexpected bill — a server failure, a ransomware attack, an emergency repair that cost three times what a monthly IT plan would have. Sometimes it comes from someone who’s been quoted … Read more
Managed IT replaces unpredictable repair bills with a flat monthly fee. A typical managed IT agreement covers proactive monitoring, patch management, helpdesk support with a pre-agreed response time and contact method, endpoint security, and backup verification. This post explains what is usually included, what is commonly billed as an extra, what managed IT is not, and how pricing models work — so you can compare providers accurately.
Break-fix IT works fine for small, simple setups — but there is a tipping point. When IT problems start costing more than repair bills, when updates happen only when someone remembers, and when security scares go unaddressed, the reactive model is no longer adequate. This post identifies five specific signs Calgary small businesses have already crossed that line and explains what a managed IT alternative actually looks like.