IT basics
How to choose an IT support provider: 10 questions to ask
Ten practical questions on pricing, scope, security responsibilities, incident response, references and exit — before you sign.
Read article →Insights
Practical IT advice, without the sales pitch.
Short, genuinely useful reads on the things that trip businesses up most often — security basics, backups, websites, and where automation actually helps.
Startups
IT for your first 10 hires
Before headcount ten, decide how new starters get a laptop, accounts and access on day one — and how that access gets switched off cleanly when someone leaves. Doing this once, properly, is far less work than untangling it later.
Read article →Startups
When to stop running the business off a personal Gmail
A personal inbox works fine for exactly one person, right up until a co-founder, an investor, or a customer needs to see something in it. The switch to a proper business email platform is cheap and quick — the longer it waits, the more there is to migrate.
Read article →Startups
What investors and enterprise buyers actually check
A growing number of funding rounds and enterprise sales now include a short technical questionnaire — MFA, backups, a written security policy, who owns IT. None of it is hard to answer well if it's already true, which is the entire point of sorting it out early.
Read article →Security
The single change that stops most phishing losses: MFA
Multi-factor authentication won't stop every attack, but it stops the overwhelming majority of account takeovers — because a stolen password alone stops being enough. If you only fix one thing this year, start with MFA on email and any system that touches money or customer data.
Read article →Backup
A backup you haven't restored isn't a backup, it's a hope
Backups fail silently more often than people expect — a job that "completes" doesn't guarantee the data is actually recoverable. The only way to know is to actually restore a file (or a whole system) from backup periodically, and confirm it works.
Read article →Websites
What a website needs before launch, beyond "it looks good"
A working contact method, a clear reason to get in touch, a mobile-friendly layout, basic on-page SEO, and someone who can actually make changes after launch — those five things matter more to results than most design details.
Read article →Automation
Where AI genuinely saves time right now — and where it doesn't yet
Summarising, drafting, sorting and repetitive data entry are strong candidates today. Fully autonomous decision-making in anything customer-facing or high-stakes still needs a human checking the output — treat AI as a fast first draft, not a finished answer.
Read article →IT basics
The one document most small businesses don't have: an IT asset list
A simple list of every device, account and subscription your business depends on — who has access, and who to call if it breaks. It sounds basic, but it's usually the thing that turns a stressful incident into a manageable one.
Read article →Compliance
Cyber Essentials, plainly explained
It's a UK government-backed baseline covering five technical controls — firewalls, secure configuration, access control, malware protection and patching. It's not a silver bullet, but it forces a level of housekeeping that catches a lot of avoidable risk.
Read article →Security
Phishing emails are getting better — here's what still gives them away
The obvious spelling mistakes and dodgy logos are mostly gone. The tells that still work are subtler, but they're still there.
Read article →IT basics
Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace? How to actually decide
Both do email, documents and video calls perfectly well. The real decision usually comes down to what your team already knows and what you're connecting it to.
Read article →Websites
Why your website's first three seconds matter more than the homepage copy
A slow-loading page loses visitors before they ever read a word you wrote. Speed is a design decision, whether or not anyone treats it like one.
Read article →Backup
The 3-2-1 backup rule, explained without the jargon
Three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy kept somewhere else entirely. It's simple on purpose.
Read article →Compliance
GDPR for small businesses: the parts that actually apply to you
You don't need a legal team to take the basics seriously. Most of what matters day to day comes down to a handful of practical habits.
Read article →Automation
Five repetitive tasks worth automating before any others
Not every manual process is worth automating. These five tend to have the best ratio of time saved to effort involved.
Read article →Have a question of your own?