New Business IT Setup

You will need reliable, secure, high-speed internet access. Because you will be using the cloud, your internet connection is a critical link:

If your internet connection goes down, you lose access to your cloud applications and data. Careful design of your connection will minimise your down-time. This might include different connection types, multiple redundant connections, using edge devices from different manufacturers, etc. Ensuring that you have the right availability, bandwidth, and latency requires specialist knowledge and careful design.

Security of your internet connection is fundamental. Your connection must be “hardened” – some sort of intrusion prevention device like a firewall will be required.

To ensure any issues with your connection are fixed quickly your internet service provider(s) must have reliable support. Separating the hype from the reality takes experience and local knowledge.

Because your staff will use workstations to access the cloud and on-premises applications and data, you will need reliable, secure workstations able to do what you need:

The type of workstation is important – for example, a business laptop running Windows 10 Professional can be made secure, can be remotely managed, and will have the horsepower for your business applications. A home computer running Windows 10 Home may not be secure, cannot be managed remotely, and may not have the necessary resources.

Your workstations must be secure – preferably centrally managed, with managed antivirus, up-to-date security patches, up-to-date operating system patches, and have managed access to prevent unauthorised use in the event of loss of the device or malicious agents.

The security of your remote workstations (at home, in site offices, etc.) is even more important. Security must be maintained on the remote location network. For example, many residential internet routers are installed with default (well known) passwords leaving them open to hacking.

You will need a disaster recovery capability:

Backups of your applications and data must be taken regularly, and it must be possible to use the backups to restore your systems.

You will need to understand how long can you survive without your mission-critical data and systems. This is known as the Recovery Time Objective (“RTO”). You will also need to understand what mission-critical systems that must brought back on-line, and how much data can be lost. This is known as the Recovery Point Objective (“RPO”). Determining the RTO and RPO then setting up your systems to achieve them requires specialist knowledge.

If you are in a regulated industry it will be necessary to archive your email and documents to comply with retention regulations.

Every business must have a website.

Many businesses start simply with the equivalent of a digital glossy brochure. A more comprehensive website with as much customer-facing information as possible will result in more hits and higher customer satisfaction. Building a website that customers want to use is an art.

Ensuring that your web site is “at the top of the list” in web search results is called Search Engine Optimisation (“SEO”). SEO is both an art and a science and requires specialist skills.

You will need email and business productivity tools:

All the standard business productivity tools are available in the cloud. Microsoft365 is the productivity suite of choice for many businesses.