Mike Stoveken
A job site is a branch office that has to be switched on before the first crew arrives, then taken apart at closeout. Here is how the connection back to headquarters should actually be built.
Before filing season, ask your IT provider what your tax software will not run on, who owns your IRIS registration, how long a real restore takes, and what happens if the server dies on April 10. There is a version of this conversation that goes nowhere. The owner asks whether everything is ready for tax … Read more
Managed IT for a construction company starts around $995 a month and usually lands higher than an office-only business of the same headcount, because every active job site carries its own connectivity, devices, and support load. Most IT quotes price a company by seat count. That works when everyone sits in one building. It stops … Read more
A Microsoft 365 migration for a small business carries two separate costs, recurring licenses at $7 to $22 per user per month plus a one-time project fee scoped to mailbox count, data volume, and what you already have running. The license half you can price yourself in about four minutes flat. Microsoft publishes those numbers. … Read more
A reasonable IT support response time is 15 minutes for anything that stops work, and one business day for a request that can wait. Response means a person answering. Resolution is a separate number, and a separate promise. Owners ask me for one number on the first call, every time, and there is no one … Read more
Your business owns its Microsoft 365 tenant, but in practice it answers to whoever holds the Global Administrator role, the domain registrar login, and the phone that answers the MFA prompt. Put all three in the company’s name now. There is no single company Microsoft account, which is the first thing worth knowing. What most … Read more
Under the Microsoft 365 shared responsibility model, Microsoft secures the platform and you secure what sits inside it. Your data, your user accounts, and your tenant settings stay yours. So does backup. Microsoft will keep the servers running. That is a genuine commitment, financially backed, and better at it than any server closet in Rockland … Read more
A new business location needs four waves of IT work in order, what the lease locks in, what gets ordered first, what gets built on site, and what you test before anyone tries to work there. Most owners call me after the lease is signed. That is the wrong week. Not fatally wrong, but the … Read more
Accounting firms count as financial institutions under federal law, so the FTC Safeguards Rule requires multi-factor authentication, encryption, access controls, and secure disposal on every system holding client data. Firm size does not change that. Most of the accounting firm owners I talk to in Rockland, Westchester, and Bergen believe cybersecurity rules are something that … Read more
For most Tri-State businesses without internal IT, Microsoft 365 is the safer default, mainly because your IT provider can fix more problems without opening a vendor ticket. Google Workspace fits teams already built around Google. Ask ten people to compare these two and you will get ten feature charts. Storage per user. Whether Excel beats … Read more
