Managed IT service tips and planning guidance for small businesses, from tax-season readiness to day-to-day IT operations.
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
A good IT contract guarantees, in writing, that you own your data, your systems, and your administrative credentials outright, with no fee and no waiting period to reclaim them. Almost none actually say that. Most owners read a contract for price. Response time, maybe. The clause that actually matters almost never gets read, because it’s … Read more
A managed IT provider is only as local as the people doing the actual work. Outsource the engineers, field techs, or help desk, and a local sales office does not make you a local provider. Anyone can put a local area code on their website. That’s not what makes an IT company local. Plenty of … Read more
Most small businesses can’t tell proactive IT support from reactive IT support until something breaks. This 12-point self-test scores your provider on monitoring, patch speed, backup testing, response time, and communication, so you know before it costs you money. Score under five and you’re paying managed-services prices for glorified break-fix. Score nine or higher and … Read more
The clearest red flags when interviewing a new IT company: a rep who never asks about your setup, no client references, pressure to sign same-day, and a proposal that never lists what’s excluded from price. You don’t need to know anything technical to catch these, just pay attention in the room, which is harder than … Read more
Revit models, AutoCAD drawings, and point-cloud scans are outgrowing the servers, VPNs, and backup windows most architecture and engineering firms built years ago, and the fix is usually storage, bandwidth, and workflow changes, not new design software. A 400MB Revit file doesn’t stay 400MB once it’s open. Revit users commonly report memory use climbing … Read more
Co-managed IT means your internal person or team keeps doing the work they’re good at, while an outside provider fills the specific gaps, after-hours monitoring, security tooling, overflow tickets, under a written split everyone agrees on ahead of time. It isn’t staff augmentation and it isn’t a takeover. It’s a third option most owners never … Read more
