Practical IT support for UK small businesses
The finished job photo, the quote scribbled in Notes, the client's mobile number saved under 'Dave - gate'. For plenty of UK small businesses, the real customer record lives on somebody's personal handset. Here's a calm, GDPR-aware way to tidy that up without issuing a phone to every member of staff.
Most small firms can tell you who has which laptop today. Ask who bought it, when the warranty runs out, or what should happen to it when that person hands in their notice, and the answer gets hazy. Here's a deliberately small asset register that a non-technical office manager can keep alive — and the awkward questions it quietly answers.
When the only phone with the authenticator app goes missing, a small business can lose access to email, finance and admin consoles in minutes. This is a practical, low-drama way to map your MFA methods, set up a safe break-glass route and test recovery before you need it.
That bulky multifunction printer by the kitchen is not just furniture. Before it goes back to the lease company, gets sold or is scrapped, it may still be holding scanned contracts, payroll forms and client records on an internal drive. Here is a practical UK small-business routine for getting the data out before the machine leaves.
When a website contact form starts attracting fake quotes, link drops and bot rubbish, the temptation is to bolt on more barriers. The better approach is to treat the form as a front door: check who is arriving, route real visitors quickly, and keep the junk away from the people who need to reply.
Flexible office space comes with a fitted kitchen, a nice meeting room and a broadband connection you don't control. Here's what that actually means for your email, your firewall and your ability to get anyone to fix a problem at 9am on a Monday.
A guest Wi-Fi name is not the same as a separate network. This 45-minute check helps small UK offices spot whether visitors, smart devices, printers and staff laptops are all sharing one flat network — and gives you a sensible list to hand to IT support.
Shared logins, a whiteboard in the comms cupboard and one long-serving colleague who knows everything — it's a pattern we see in almost every small UK office we walk into. Here's the four-week, low-drama way to move to a proper password manager, including what to do when someone quietly refuses to install it.
Someone can send email that looks like it came from your own address, and your customers have no easy way to tell. Here's a calm, practical route through SPF, DKIM and DMARC for a small UK firm, starting with monitoring and only tightening the rules once you know who legitimately sends as you.
Consumer extended security updates for Windows 10 ended on 13 October 2026, but the odd straggler is still humming away in UK small offices. Here is a calm, practical order of work for finding those machines, isolating the risky ones, and deciding between refurbished Windows 11 hardware, a straight replacement, Linux, or commercial ESU.
That old desktop in the cupboard is not just clutter — it is a storage device with a history. Here is a practical 45-minute routine for UK small firms to retire a computer cleanly, from asset register to WEEE paperwork.
Someone signed up for a free tool with their work email in about ten seconds, and two years later it's still running, still holding customer names, and nobody has ever looked at it. Here's a gentle, practical way to find those apps, work out which ones deserve a closer look under UK GDPR, and clear out the ones that don't.
Your domain is the address on the van, the link in every quote, and the front door for customers. Yet the registrar login often sits untouched for years. Here's a practical, coffee-length review covering transfer locks, auto-renew, recovery contacts, DNS alerts and a simple rehearsal for the day the domain goes missing.
Supplier invoice fraud rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a familiar PDF, a polite nudge and a new sort code. Here's a practical 2026 playbook for UK small firms: spot the switch, verify by phone, tighten the mailbox, and keep legitimate suppliers moving.
Copilot doesn't create new leaks; it exposes the ones already sitting in SharePoint and OneDrive. Before you switch it on, run a short permission audit that closes stale guest links, tightens broad access and sets a simple no-go list for sensitive files.
Most small firms only find out what they don't control on the day they try to leave an IT provider. This is a calm, practical rehearsal you can run in 90 minutes—covering Microsoft 365, DNS, backups, phones and data handover—so a future provider switch is boring rather than dramatic.
Cloud services are convenient right up to the moment a renewal email lands with new terms, a higher price or a product name you no longer recognise. This guide explains what you actually own, what you need to export, and how to keep a one-page exit plan ready without turning it into a project.
Most small firms treat the helpdesk as a repair shop: something breaks, someone fixes it, everyone moves on. But the same tickets, read in batches rather than one at a time, can reveal phishing attempts, account takeover attempts and ageing kit long before they become an incident.
The UK's old phone network is winding down, and the tricky part is rarely the desk phone. It is the alarm, lift line, card terminal or fax that quietly depends on it. Here is a calm, checklist-led way to find every line, ask the right questions and test before you switch.
Insurers are asking sharper questions about multi-factor authentication, tested backups and incident plans — and 'we are careful' is not an answer. This is a practical walk through a typical 2026 questionnaire, with the simple evidence a small UK firm can gather without hiring a security consultant.