Managed IT service tips and planning guidance for small businesses, from tax-season readiness to day-to-day IT operations.
Most Westchester small businesses answer to some mix of New York’s SHIELD Act, HIPAA, the DFS cybersecurity regulation, the FTC Safeguards Rule, and PCI DSS, and most of those rules ask for the same core controls. Which ones apply to you depends on your industry and the data you hold, not on the county. SHIELD. … Read more
A new hire is ready on day one when IT has already created their own Microsoft 365 account, prepared a managed laptop, planned their MFA sign-in, and granted only the files, mailboxes, and apps the job needs. Most onboarding work should be finished before the person walks in. Gallup reported in 2018 that only 12% … Read more
For a 50-person business already on Microsoft 365, identity and access management usually adds $4 to $14 per user per month in licensing, about $2,400 to $8,400 a year, plus a few hundred dollars once for hardware security keys. Most of what people picture when they hear “identity and access management” is priced for companies … Read more
Microsoft 365 Business Premium adds the security tools that Business Basic and Business Standard leave out, including Conditional Access through Entra ID P1, Intune, Defender for Business, data loss prevention, sensitivity labels, and Message Encryption. Standard’s step up from Basic is mainly the desktop apps, not stronger protection. Microsoft does sell some security products on … Read more
Letting employees pick their own laptops usually saves a little at the register and costs more over the machine’s life, in setup labor, security gaps, and support time, because every different model becomes its own small IT project. I understand why owners allow it. Someone new joins, they have strong opinions about keyboards, and a … Read more
Business email lands in spam when the receiving system can’t verify or trust the sender, either because your own domain lacks working SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, or because the invoice came from an app’s mail server, not yours. The first fix is finding out which of the two your invoices fall into. If your business … Read more
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three DNS records that let a small business prove which email really comes from its domain, and ask every receiving server to reject the forgeries instead of delivering them. Victims reported $3,046,598,558 in business email compromise losses in 2025, across 24,768 complaints to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Only … Read more
Guest WiFi network separation gives visitors the internet and nothing else, by putting them on their own network segment, blocking every route from that segment into your business systems at the firewall, and isolating guest devices from one another. A second network name on the same equipment does none of that by itself. Plenty of … Read more
Your office Wi-Fi dies at 2 PM because you run out of airtime, not internet bandwidth. Wi-Fi lets one device transmit at a time per radio, so every laptop, phone and video call queues for the same turn. Owners almost always open this conversation the same way. They want to know whether they should call … Read more
A behavioral health practice needs about 4 Mbps of upload for every HD telehealth session running at the same time, plus a firewall that shapes and prioritizes that traffic so backups and file sync cannot crowd it out. Those are the telehealth network requirements that decide whether a session holds, and download speed is rarely … Read more
