Managed IT service tips and planning guidance for small businesses, from tax-season readiness to day-to-day IT operations.
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
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business runs $21 per user per month on an annual term, discounted to $18 through December 31, 2026, and it only surfaces files and messages the person asking could already open. That last half of the sentence is the part worth slowing down on. Price is the easy part. Most of the … 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
For most Rockland County small businesses, cybersecurity is not a separate line item. Here is what sits inside a managed IT agreement, what gets quoted separately, and the order to buy it in.
Keep the file server if your daily workflow depends on it, and move to SharePoint or OneDrive if your people need to restore their own files without calling IT. Most small businesses are better off running both. My answer here is the same one I give when somebody asks whether they should scrap their server … Read more
Bergen County businesses are moving off two mismatched setups, an enterprise-tier IT vendor built for a company five times their size, or an internal team stretched too thin to keep up. A right-sized MSP matches support to the business a company actually is, not a pricing tier built for someone else. Over half of small … Read more
A 20-employee Rockland County business should budget roughly $24,000 to $50,000 a year for IT, once managed support, hardware refresh, licensing, and a downtime reserve are all accounted for, not just the monthly service contract. Most IT budget conversations stop at one number, what the managed IT contract costs per month. That number matters, and … Read more
Westchester businesses are switching to VJNetworks despite our headquarters sitting across the Hudson in Rockland County, because the Tappan-Zee Bridge (we’re never going to call it the Mario Cuomo bridge, sorry not sorry) turns “across the river” into a twenty to forty minute drive, not a different market entirely. I hear the same question on … Read more
Renewal questions have shifted from whether you own a control to whether anyone maintains it. Detection somebody watches, a firewall still being patched, and a backup you can prove.
A NIST CSF 2.0 self-assessment scores your business against six Functions, Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover, then documents the gap between what you actually do today and what you should be doing. Nobody grades it. There is no auditor, no certificate, no minimum score to hit. NIST publishes the whole framework as voluntary … Read more
