Four things land on your desk at the end.
Plenty of firms will give you a free look at your network. Fewer will put the result in writing, because a document can be checked later against what actually happened, handed to an insurer or a customer who asks, and read by somebody who was not in the room when it was explained. That is the part worth having. Ask for it in writing.
A written findings document
What we found, where we found it, and how we tested it. Plain English. Yours to keep, and readable by somebody who has never opened a switch.
A ranked risk list
Ordered by what would actually hurt the business rather than by what is easiest to sell you. Some items cost nothing to fix. A few of them you can close yourself the same afternoon.
A number against each item
What closing each gap would cost. Roughly, but honestly. A list of problems with no prices against it is not a plan. It is a worry list.
A straight answer on fit
Including when the answer is no. Sometimes your current provider is doing fine and the honest thing is to say so.
Six things we look at.
The list is deliberately short. VJNetworks would rather look properly at six things that decide whether your week goes smoothly than produce a forty-page inventory of everything a scanning tool happened to notice on the day it ran. Six is enough.
Network and internet
Circuit, firewall, switches, wireless coverage. Measured across a working week rather than sampled once on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, because the number that matters is the one at your busiest hour.
Workstations and servers
Age, memory, disk health, patch level. Also which machines are past the point where repairing them makes sense, which is usually two or three of them.
Backup and recovery
Not whether backups run. Everyone says backups run. Whether a restore has ever been performed, how long it took, and what actually came back. Covered further on our backup and disaster recovery page.
Accounts and access
Who can reach what. Whether multi-factor is genuinely enforced rather than merely switched on somewhere in a settings page, and how many live accounts still belong to people who left.
Microsoft 365
Tenant configuration, mail security, sharing settings. Also the retention gap that most owners assume Microsoft already covers on their behalf, which it does not in the way people expect, and which tends to surface at the exact moment somebody needs a deleted mailbox back.
Licensing and spend
What you are paying each month, and what is still being billed for somebody who left in 2023. This one often pays for itself.
About a week, and almost none of your time.
Most of it happens quietly in the background. We need a short call at the start, read-only access to look at what is already there, and a walk around the office if there is hardware worth seeing in person. Your staff carry on working. Nobody has to stop.
Then we write it up and walk you through it. Thirty minutes, usually. You keep the document regardless of what you decide afterwards, and there is no automated follow-up sequence waiting behind it, which is the part people ask about most often once they have been burned by one.
Who is doing the looking.
Worth knowing before you hand anyone read-only access. VJNetworks has run this in the Tri-State area since 2004.
Four steps, start to document.
You send the form
Headcount, roughly what you run, and what prompted this. Two minutes. No attachments.
A short scoping call
Fifteen minutes. We agree what is in scope, who we talk to, and what we will need access to.
We look
Read-only, in the background, across a normal working week, so the busy hours are included rather than quietly avoided the way a one-off scan tends to avoid them.
You get the document
Walked through in half an hour, then handed over. After that it is yours.
Who this is worth doing for.
Worth doing if
You run 5 to 60 people across Rockland, Westchester, or Bergen. Nobody in the building can currently tell you when a restore was last tested, and the honest reason is that it has never been anybody’s specific job to know.
Or you are weighing up a change of provider. Or you inherited a setup nobody documented. Or a customer has started asking security questions in writing and you need something to answer them with.
Probably not worth it if
You already have an internal IT team running your own reviews on a schedule. You will not learn much here. Save the week.
You want somebody to look at one broken machine. That is a support call. Reasonable thing to want, just not this.
Before you fill anything in.
Is it actually free, or free until the report arrives?
Actually free. The document is yours at the end either way. We run assessments because a fair number of them turn into work, and because the ones that do not still teach us something about the area we operate in, which is worth the week on its own. If we thought you needed nothing, we would rather say so and be the people you call in two years.
We already have an IT provider. Is this going behind their back?
Your call, not ours. Plenty of owners tell their provider up front and nothing awkward happens. A second opinion is a normal thing to want on something you are paying for monthly and cannot easily evaluate. If the findings say your provider is doing a good job, that is what the document will say.
What access do you need, and how much can you see?
Read-only. Scoped to what we agreed on the call, and nothing that lets us change a setting. In practice that means a view of your Microsoft 365 tenant, your network equipment, and a look at a sample of machines. If any of that is a problem we work around it and note the gap in the findings.
How is this different from the free scan every vendor offers?
An automated scan produces a list of everything a tool noticed, which is a very different thing from a list of what matters to a business your size with your customers and your obligations. Ours is read by a person who has been doing this for over 20 years and then ranked by consequence to your business. Length is easy. Judgement is the part you are actually after.
Will this disrupt anyone while it is running?
It should not. Everything is read-only and most of it runs in the background. The only time we need from your staff is a short call at the beginning and a walk around if there is equipment worth looking at.
What happens after I send the form?
A person reads it and replies within 15 minutes during business hours. Not an autoresponder. The first reply suggests a time for the scoping call, and if it turns out at that point that an assessment would not tell you anything you do not already know, we will say so rather than booking one to fill the calendar.
No rush. If you would rather read about the day to day first, our managed IT services page covers what ongoing support looks like, and cybersecurity covers the security side specifically. You can also just get in touch without booking anything.
Find out what is actually running underneath.
It takes about a week. It costs nothing. It ends with a document you keep, and the worst realistic outcome is finding out your setup is in better shape than you feared.