Are you a managed service provider?
In the co-managed and project sense, yes; in the sense of a staffed 24-hour desk, no — and we would rather say that than sell it. What we run is 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, with a response time in writing during business hours, for the systems we set up. If your operation needs someone awake at 3am every night, you need a provider with a night shift; we will say which parts of your estate genuinely do, and we work next to plenty of them.
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; the copier's own hardware stays with the copier dealer.
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.
Is NIST CSF 2.0 a certification you hold?
No — NIST does not certify anyone against it. The Cybersecurity Framework is something an organization adopts, not 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 and say exactly that on our confidentiality page. 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 auditor, and we help you prepare for it rather than pretend to be one.
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 for the work that needs hands — a rack, a Wi-Fi survey, a cutover weekend — rather than a same-day promise. 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?
Without a number, because every honest one depends on the count: how many people and machines, how many sites, which hours are covered, 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 you can end it. What you will not get is a flat monthly figure with nothing behind it.
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.
