Case study: IT for a growing Austin architecture firm, from a faster network to an alarm on its backup
A practice of eight to ten people, working in design software and shared files, does not need an IT department. It needs the work one does, done by people who answer the same day: a network that keeps up, laptops that work anywhere, files that are safe on the day something goes wrong, and one place to ask.
This is the story of one such firm, an architecture practice in Austin, Texas that has been our client since September 2026 and is still growing. It is written for the owner of a small firm deciding whether to hand IT to someone, and for the person who has been doing it on the side. It is the first of our IT client stories, so it says plainly what it does not show.
The short version
- Twelve days from the firm's first message to its accepted quotation: 5 September to 17 September. The first help-desk request, a laptop setup, came the same day.
- The new network went live on 21 September. By the engineer's measure the wireless runs at about twice the speed, and ads and risky sites, about a quarter of what the filter sees, are filtered out.
- Staff can work from anywhere as they would at the desk, and we support a laptop remotely. Every existing laptop was audited: inventory, antivirus on and verified, disk encryption confirmed.
- The nightly copy covers 10 shared drives and 9 personal drives, 19 jobs, over a terabyte. The four nights on record, 26 to 29 October, each completed all 19 jobs in about 17 minutes.
- If the copy goes quiet for 26 hours, a ticket opens by itself.
Free PDF · 6 pagesIT for a growing Austin firm: Case studyThe case study as a six-page PDF: the situation, what we delivered, the four jobs we run, the four decisions behind the backup with the reasons, the nightly record and the timeline, what the service is not, and how a review of your own IT starts.Download the PDF →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. The second is the one most small firms do not ask for until a backup has already failed silently.
What we delivered
Two pieces of work, one for the people at their desks and one for the people who are not.
- A faster, quieter network, live on 21 September. 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.
- Work anywhere, kept safe. Remote work as at the desk, and remote support, so a laptop is fixed without a drive across town. A device audit of every existing laptop. 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.
The speed and filter figures are the engineer's, reported on 29 October 2026, and have not yet been taken from a ticket. We print them with that attribution and will replace them with the recorded before and after.
What we run for it, day to day
- Ask. A request raised in the portal gets a ticket number, and every reply carries it with a link back. Ten requests have come through since 17 September: three laptop setups, two on Wi-Fi and the network, one Google account, one software install, one question, and two not yet sorted.
- Run. Laptops installed and set up, Google Workspace accounts and settings administered, the network and Wi-Fi looked after, the licences kept straight.
- Copy. Every shared drive and every person's own drive copied each night to a disk the firm owns, on its own network, and kept for 30 days.
- Watch. Each run reports in. A missing report is the alarm.
Four decisions behind the backup, and why
The backup is where the choices mattered most, because it is the part nobody sees until the day it is needed.
- The copy lives on a disk the firm owns. Its 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.
- 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.
- 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, none of which send anything. Each run reports success, and a missing report is what raises the alert.
- 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.
A system that only reports failures is indistinguishable from a system that is working, for months, until someone asks for a file.
The record, as at 29 October 2026
The first full copy started on the evening of 23 October and ran over the weekend. Since then, the four nights on record (26, 27, 28 and 29 October) took 16.5, 18.5, 16.8 and 16.9 minutes and each completed all 19 jobs. The second night wrote more new data than the others, 8.2 GiB against between 0.7 and 2.9, because a run copies only what changed.
What this does not show
- A copy, not a mirror. A file deleted from a shared drive stays in the copy for 30 days, and then goes.
- Completion, not restoration. The record shows the copies run and report. It does not show that a file has been restored from them, and we do not claim it.
- 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.
- One firm. A practice of eight to ten people is one data point about a service we run, not a rate.
If you are the owner of a firm like this
Ask three questions of whoever looks after your IT today. Where is the second copy of our shared files, and who owns the disk it is on? Who would know within a day if it stopped? And if I need help this afternoon, where does the team send the request? If any answer is "I would have to check", that is where a review starts.