A growing firm’s IT, run end to end: a faster network, work from anywhere, every shared drive copied every night, and an alarm if the copy goes quiet.

The situation

A practice of eight to ten people that runs on design software and shared files. Its network came from the internet provider, its files lived in one cloud service, and IT was something members of the firm handled alongside their own work. The firm wanted two things: one place to send the team first for everything day to day, and a way to know if its nightly backup ever stopped working.

What we delivered

Two pieces of work, one for the people at their desks and one for the people who are not.

• Live on 21 September.

  A faster, quieter network

  • About twice the wireless speed.
  • Ads and risky sites filtered: about a quarter of what the filter sees.
  • Bandwidth monitored, so people stay safe without the distraction.
  • A separate fast network for machines that stay near the access point.

  Reported by the engineer who did the work, as at 29 October 2026. Not yet taken from a ticket.

• Set up with the first laptops.

  Work anywhere, kept safe

  • Remote work from anywhere, as at the desk, and remote support, so a laptop is fixed without a drive across town.
  • A device audit of every existing laptop: inventory, antivirus on and verified, disk encryption confirmed.
  • Endpoint protection on every machine.
  • Google Drive copied nightly to a disk on the firm's own premises.
  • Licence management for the design software, floating and named-user.
  • Incident observation: someone is watching, and a silent backup opens a ticket by itself.

What we run for it

Four jobs, in the order a firm meets them.

1. 1 · Ask

   One place to ask. A request raised in the portal gets a ticket number, and every reply carries it with a link back.

2. 2 · Run

   Laptops installed and set up, Google Workspace accounts and settings administered, Wi-Fi and the network looked after.

3. 3 · Copy

   Every shared drive and every person's own drive copied each night to a disk the firm owns, on its own network.

4. 4 · Watch

   Each run reports in. If a night goes quiet for 26 hours, a ticket opens by itself.

Four decisions, and why

The backup is where the choices mattered most, because it is the part nobody sees until the day it is needed.

• Decision 1

  The copy lives on a disk the firm owns

  The firm's files then depend neither on one cloud provider nor on us. If either went away, the copy would still be there, on its own network.

• Decision 2

  Staff can read the copy and cannot change it

  Browsing is read-only and gives no command line. A copy that anyone can edit is a second place to lose work.

• Decision 3

  Silence is the alarm, not the error email

  A backup that fails loudly is the easy case. The one that matters is the power cut, the unmounted disk, the job someone switched off. Each run reports success, and a missing report is what raises the alert.

• Decision 4

  One ticket per outage, not one per hour

  An alert that repeats every hour gets filtered, and then it is not an alert. The monitor opens one ticket and stays quiet until it is resolved and a good run arrives.

The record

The first full copy ran over a weekend, from the evening of 23 October. Since then, the four nights on record have each taken under twenty minutes.

What this is not

• A copy, not a mirror. A file deleted from a shared drive stays in the copy for 30 days, and then goes.
• Targets, not guarantees. The help desk's response and resolution targets are written into its service policies. They are targets for how we work, not a promise about any one request.
• Not a replacement for the firm's own care. The copy protects the files. It does not decide who in the firm should have access to them.

Is this your firm?

If you have between five and fifty people, no one whose job is IT, and shared files you could not afford to lose, the starting point is a review of what you run today. It is the same first step we took here.