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Managed IT, Cybersecurity & Managed AI Guides
Ready-to-use checklists and guides on onboarding, backups, security and AI from our team.
Checklists
Three lists worth keeping.
New-employee onboarding
- Account creation coordinated with HR start date
- Device prepared to the business-class standard, with data migration if replacing
- Applications installed and licensed
- Security enrollment: MFA, password manager, endpoint protection
- Access configured: mailboxes, shared drives, Teams, line-of-business systems
- Role-based orientation on phones, printing and how to reach support
Employee offboarding
- Account disabled on schedule, with sign-in sessions revoked
- Mail forwarding and access reviewed and documented
- Licenses reclaimed and reassigned
- Device recovered and re-imaged or retired
- Shared credentials rotated where the person had access
- Vendor and portal access removed
Backup readiness
- Every business-critical workload identified and mapped to the backup platform
- Restore points current, alarms reviewed
- Retention long enough to cover late-discovered deletion
- Microsoft 365 explicitly included if that data matters
- Escalation path for failures defined
- Recovery plan discussed, not assumed
Explainers by topic
More articles
- An IT checklist for accounting firms before busy season. — Nine IT steps for accounting and CPA firms before tax season: WISP, multi-factor authentication, tested backups, tax software, patching, remote work, phishing training and secure file exchange.
- What a virtual CIO actually does, and when you need one. — A virtual CIO provides strategic IT leadership without a full-time hire: roadmaps, budgets, risk and lifecycle planning. What a vCIO does and signs you need one.
- Co-managed IT: how it works when you already have an IT person. — Co-managed IT services keep your in-house IT person in charge and put a full team behind them. How the work is divided, signs you need it, and questions to ask a provider.
Business continuity
- Is your backup actually ready? Six questions to ask. — Having backup software on a server doesn’t mean your important systems are protected. Here is how we check whether a backup would actually get you back to work.
AI services
- Skill, Workflow or Agent? How to tell which one you need. — Three words that get used interchangeably describe three very different shapes of AI capability — with different costs, risks and maintenance needs.
- ChatGPT or Claude? How we choose a platform for a client. — We do not sell both platforms to every client. Here is the scored evaluation we use to pick a primary platform — and the narrow cases where a second one makes sense.
- What an AI Assessment actually answers. — Five practical questions leadership can act on.
- What “maintenance” means — and what counts as a new build. — The line between keeping an AI capability working and building something new, spelled out so there are no surprises on either side.
Planning
- Know what to fix now, what to budget next, and what can wait. — What actually happens in a recurring technology business review — and why the same team that sees your tickets should be in the room when the roadmap is written.
Microsoft 365
- Before Copilot: what to check in your Microsoft 365 tenant. — AI inside Microsoft 365 inherits whatever permissions and data exposure already exist. Fix the foundations first.
Want a checklist run against your environment?
A technology assessment does exactly that — across identity, endpoints, security, backup and documentation.