Are you a managed service provider?
Yes, for project and co-managed IT: the cleanup, the migration, the network that finally gets drawn, the printer fixed at the cause — and then a retainer for the systems we set up, with the response time in writing and support that is 24/7. Where part of your operation runs overnight, the engineer on call knows that shift's systems too, and we will help you work out which parts of your estate genuinely need watching around the clock.
Is support really 24/7, or is that just monitoring?
It is a person. The monitoring agent runs around the clock on the systems we manage, and so does the engineer on call: when something is down at night or on a weekend, the call is answered by somebody who has read your network, because they set it up. Routine requests — a new starter, a mailbox change, a printer that moved desks — go through the ticket queue, and the response time for those is written into the retainer. Project work is scheduled in business hours, so a migration begins at midnight only when the cutover plan says so.
We are a small office of fifteen people with no IT person. Is that too small?
No; small businesses are most of the calls this page gets. A small office needs the same inventory a large one does, only shorter: the accounts, the laptops, the firewall the internet provider installed, the copier, the one application the business runs on, and where each of those is backed up. It usually turns into a handful of fixed-price projects — multi-factor sign-in on every account, a backup somebody has restored from, a firewall the business owns — and then support sized to how many people and machines there are, so a fifteen-person office pays for a fifteen-person office. Below ten people, when the whole office lives in Microsoft 365 with no server, a project or two and a number to call is usually the honest shape, and the guide on what a small office needs from IT support walks through the list.
What does managed IT cost?
Houston providers publish $75 to $275 per user per month for managed IT. For an office of ten to fifty people on Microsoft 365, our retainer lands in the lower half of that band, and the free inventory turns it into one fixed monthly figure before anything is signed: sized to headcount and device count, with the response time written in. Project work is quoted as a fixed price per project from the same inventory, and the first conversation is free.
Why does our network printer keep going offline?
Usually it is addressing, not hardware. The printer took its address from DHCP, the lease changed over the weekend, and every PC's queue still points at the old one — or Windows added it as a WSD device, which finds the printer by broadcast and loses it whenever the printer sleeps. The fix is a reserved address, a standard TCP/IP port, one driver deployed from a print server, and power settings that leave the network interface awake. A reboot fixes it too, which is exactly why it has never been fixed. Most of this is done remotely, and if the copier's own hardware turns out to be at fault, we get the dealer out and see the repair through.
Who looks after Active Directory when the one person who knew it leaves?
Whoever inherits the domain admin password, which is the problem. Start with an inventory rather than a hire: every enabled account, every group, every Group Policy object and what it actually changes, every service account and which application breaks if it is disabled. Most domains we read have accounts for people who left years ago and policies that cancel each other out. Once that map exists, the day-to-day is a short runbook a generalist can follow, and the parts that need an expert are the parts we keep on a retainer.
Should we still run on-premises Active Directory, or go Entra ID only?
It depends on what is on the floor. If the estate is laptops, browsers, and Microsoft 365, cloud-only Entra ID with Intune is simpler and cheaper to run. If you have file servers, a line-of-business application that authenticates against the domain, warehouse scanners, or a print server, on-premises Active Directory stays and Entra Connect joins the two — most mid-sized estates we see are hybrid for exactly that reason. The decision is made by an inventory of what authenticates where, so that is what we produce first.
Windows 10 is out of support. What happens to the machines that cannot run Windows 11?
They keep booting and stop receiving security fixes; support ended on October 14, 2025. A business can buy Extended Security Updates a year at a time for up to three years, which is a bridge rather than a plan. We put every machine on one list — passes the Windows 11 check, needs a firmware setting changed to pass, or is genuinely too old — and the refresh gets budgeted from that list instead of from a guess. Microsoft 365 Apps keep getting security updates on Windows 10 until October 10, 2028, which buys time for the replacement schedule, not a reason to skip it.
What does Texas law actually expect of a small business's cybersecurity?
Two things worth knowing, stated as the statutes read rather than as legal advice. Since September 1, 2025, Senate Bill 2610 shields a business with fewer than 250 employees from exemplary damages after a breach if it can show it maintained a cybersecurity program conforming to a recognized framework — NIST CSF or the CIS Controls among them — with the expected rigor scaling by headcount. And Business & Commerce Code §521.053 sets the clocks after a breach: affected Texans within 60 days, the Attorney General within 30 when 250 or more are affected. The baseline we build is written against those two, and the document goes to your lawyer as well as your IT closet.
Can a company be certified against NIST CSF 2.0?
NIST itself certifies nobody against it. The Cybersecurity Framework is something an organization adopts and runs, rather than an audit it passes; a 'NIST CSF certificate' is a private assessor's attestation, not a standing with NIST. We run our own practice on CSF 2.0, as our confidentiality page describes. For a client, the baseline we write uses the 56 safeguards of CIS Controls Implementation Group 1 as the floor for a company under a hundred people, and maps to CSF 2.0 for larger ones; that is also the shape SB 2610 asks a program to take. If a customer or insurer wants an audited attestation, that is a SOC 2 engagement with an independent auditor, and we help you prepare for it.
How do we keep working when the power is out for a week?
By deciding in advance which things must survive an outage and which just need to come back cleanly. Mail, files, and identity in Microsoft 365 mean a dark office is not a dark business — people work from wherever has power. The on-premises servers get a UPS sized to run a clean shutdown script, not to keep the lights on, and a generator transfer that has been tested under load. Backups go off-site and immutable, and the restore has been rehearsed with a stopwatch. Beryl in 2024 and Winter Storm Uri in 2021 both proved the same thing: the plan has to exist before the forecast does.
Do you come on-site outside Houston?
Yes, on a schedule. We are based in Houston and on-site across the Greater Houston metro as a matter of course, warehouses included. Dallas–Fort Worth is about three and a half hours up I-45, and Austin and San Antonio are similar trips west. A visit there is a day we plan with you for the work that needs hands — a rack, a Wi-Fi survey, a cutover weekend. Most of the rest — identity, Microsoft 365, patching, monitoring, the help desk — is remote work wherever the office is, and we do it for companies across Texas.
What does IT support cost, and how is it quoted?
From the count, because every honest number depends on it: how many people and machines, how many sites, how much security tooling and documentation you need, and how much cleanup the estate needs before anyone can support it. So it is quoted in that order. The inventory and diagram come first, at a fixed price. Each project they turn up is quoted at a fixed price too. Ongoing support is a monthly retainer sized to headcount and device count, and every line of it traces back to something the inventory found.
We already have an IT company. What would you add?
Usually the problems that fall between the software vendor and the IT provider: the printer the provider calls a software issue and the vendor calls a network issue, the integration waiting on a service account nobody will create, the Active Directory cleanup that keeps slipping behind the ticket queue. We take those as scoped projects, write up what we did, and hand it back. If the relationship is working we make it easier; if it is not, an assessment says so with specifics rather than a pitch.
