Knowledge Center
Straight answers to the questions business owners actually ask about IT.
Written to be useful whether or not you ever hire us. Each article answers one question directly, explains the tradeoffs, and names the mistakes we see most often.
Managed IT
What does a managed service provider actually do?
A managed service provider takes ongoing responsibility for a company's technology: monitoring systems, patching and maintaining them, supporting employees, managing security and backups, coordinating vendors, and planning upgrades. The relationship is continuous and priced monthly, rather than being called in after something breaks.
MSP vs internal IT department: how to decide
The decision is about coverage, not headcount. One internal generalist cannot be expert in help desk, servers, networking, security and strategy simultaneously, and cannot cover nights, vacations or a second site. An MSP provides breadth and continuity; internal staff provide business context. Many mid-sized companies get the best result by combining both.
Business Continuity
Backup vs disaster recovery: what's the difference?
Backup is a copy of data stored somewhere else. Disaster recovery is the architecture, plan and tested process for getting systems and people working again after a failure. A company can have perfect backups and still be down for a week, because copying data and restoring operations are different problems.
What happens when a server fails?
When a server fails, the recovery path depends entirely on what was designed in advance. With image-level backups and local virtualization, the workload can be booted from a recent copy and users can be back in the application quickly. Without that, recovery means sourcing hardware, rebuilding the operating system and restoring data — typically a multi-day sequence.
Microsoft 365
Does Microsoft 365 include backup?
Not in the way most businesses assume. Microsoft guarantees the availability of the service and provides limited recovery through recycle bins, retention policies and version history. It does not provide long-term, point-in-time restore of mail, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams data. Protecting that history against deletion, corruption and malicious activity is the customer's responsibility.
Entra ID vs Active Directory — and can you drop the domain controller?
Active Directory is the on-premises directory that authenticates domain-joined machines and applies group policy inside a network. Entra ID is Microsoft's cloud identity service that authenticates users to Microsoft 365 and connected apps and enforces MFA and Conditional Access. They solve overlapping but different problems, and many environments run both.
SharePoint vs file server: which should you use?
SharePoint and OneDrive suit collaborative documents, remote access and external sharing, with versioning and cloud security built in. A file server still makes sense for very large files, latency-sensitive workflows, and applications that require a UNC path. Most companies end up with a deliberate mix rather than a full migration.
Schedule an IT assessment.
We review your network, security posture, cloud tenant and recovery plan, then hand you a plain-language report of what we found and what it means for the business.