IT support answers for Northeast Florida businesses
352 straight answers about managed IT, pricing, response times, security, Microsoft 365, networks and the industries we support across Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. Prefer to browse and search? Use the knowledge base.
Help with something specific
Common problems and requests, with a few things to try yourself before you call.
Computers and everyday problems
- Why won't my printer print?
- Why is this one computer so slow?
- What do I do when a computer won't turn on?
- How do I get files off a dead computer?
- Who do we call to set up a new employee's computer?
- What computers should we buy for the office?
- Who do we call to buy computers through?
- Who do we call about a warranty claim?
- Why does everything slow down after a Windows update?
- We still have Windows 10 machines. What do we do?
Network, Wi-Fi and installs
- Who do we call to install a new network switch?
- Who do we call to install access points or fix our Wi-Fi coverage?
- Who do we call to install or replace a firewall?
- Who do we call to run network cable or add drops?
- Who do we call to set up the network in a new office?
- Who do we call to clean up the server closet?
- Who do we call for the IT side of an office move?
- Who do we call to connect a second location?
- Why doesn't my Wi-Fi cover the whole office?
- Why is the Wi-Fi fine at my desk and terrible in the back?
- What do I do when the internet goes out at the office?
- How do I tell if it's my internet provider or my equipment?
- Why is everything slow at 2pm but fine at 8am?
- What do I do when the VPN won't connect?
- Who do I call for UniFi support?
- Who do I call for firewall support?
- Do we need a real firewall, or is the router from our internet provider enough?
- How many access points does an office actually need?
- Our internet provider manages our firewall. Why does every change take so long?
- What actually needs a firewall change, and how often does it come up?
- The firewall is blocking something and people cannot work. What happens next?
- Who should be able to change our firewall, and should we have access ourselves?
Microsoft 365, email and cloud
- How do I migrate to Microsoft 365?
- How do I move email off GoDaddy, an old host, or a personal Gmail?
- How do I move our files off the office server to SharePoint?
- Who do we call to move to Google Workspace, or off it?
- Who do we call to host our server in the cloud?
- Who do we call to set up hosted desktops?
- Who do we call for Azure help?
- Who do we call to set up SharePoint properly?
- Who do we call to clean up our SharePoint and OneDrive mess?
- Who do we call to set up Outlook for our staff?
- Who do we call to set up company-wide email signatures?
- Who do we call to sort out our folder structure and permissions?
- Who do we call to set up Teams properly?
- Who do we call to set up a shared mailbox?
- Who do we call to tighten up our Microsoft 365 security settings?
- Why can't I get into my email?
- Why does Teams keep disconnecting or dropping calls?
- What Microsoft 365 license do we actually need?
- Who do we call to clean up licenses we're not using?
- How do I share a big file with someone outside the company?
- Why are we suddenly getting so much spam and phishing?
- Who do I call for Office 365 help?
- What email security do you put in place beyond what Microsoft includes?
- How do we stop staff getting fake emails from the boss?
Who to call to manage our systems
- Who do we call to manage our computers?
- Who do we call to manage our network?
- Who do we call to manage our Microsoft 365 tenant?
- Who do we call to manage our servers?
- Who do we call to manage our backups?
- Who do we call to manage our security?
- Who do we call to keep our computers patched and updated?
- Who do we call to monitor our systems?
- Who do we call to manage our IT vendors?
- Who do we call if we have no IT person at all?
Choosing an IT provider
The questions worth asking any provider you are considering, and our answers.
Pricing and contracts
- How much does managed IT cost, and how is it billed?
- What is included in the monthly fee, and what gets billed separately?
- Is there a long term contract, and how do I get out of it?
- Are there onboarding or setup fees?
- What happens to my price if I add or lose employees?
- Is after hours or emergency work extra?
- How is project work priced for managed clients?
- Is your pricing a flat rate, or are there costs that show up later?
- If onboarding goes badly or we are not satisfied early on, are we locked in?
- Where do businesses like ours waste money on IT?
- Have you ever underquoted a job? What happened?
- How long are we committing to, and what does it cost to get out?
- How is backup priced?
Break-fix or monthly agreement
- Do you do hourly break-fix work, or only monthly agreements?
- Talk me out of just calling you when something breaks.
- What is your hourly rate if we just want occasional help?
- If we stay hourly, do we go to the back of the line behind your contract clients?
- Can we start hourly and move to an agreement later without paying setup twice?
- How do we know a monthly agreement is worth it for us specifically?
Support and response times
- How fast will someone respond when something breaks?
- Do I get a dedicated technician, or whoever answers?
- What happens if my main technician quits or is on vacation?
- Are you available nights and weekends?
- Is support remote only, or will someone come onsite?
- How do I submit a ticket, and who answers the phone?
- What happens when your help desk cannot fix it?
- How fast can you get a new employee set up, and is there a charge?
- Who do we call if the problem is with you rather than with our systems?
- What happens if you miss your response commitments?
- When somebody leaves, how fast is their access actually gone?
- The whole office is down. What actually happens?
- How fast can someone be onsite?
- Is your support team in house, or do you use outside partners?
- Who picks up at 2am, and have they seen our network before?
Fit and experience
- Have you worked with businesses my size?
- Do you support the specific software my business runs on?
- Can I talk to some of your current clients?
- Are you locally owned?
- What kinds of businesses usually come to you, and why?
- If we hire our own IT person, do you offer a co-managed option?
- Our office manager will be your main contact, not me. How does that work?
- Do you actually have someone who understands networking, or does everything become “reboot it”?
- We have eighty people across four offices. Are we too big for you?
- Can we have someone onsite five days a week?
- Our internal IT person is not keeping up. Do we replace them or add to them?
- What does support look like when a carrier manages the network?
- We already signed with our provider for the network. Can you still help us?
Security and compliance
- What do you do to protect us from ransomware and phishing?
- Is security included, or is it an add on?
- Do you handle backups, and how do you know they work?
- Do you monitor for security events, or just for outages?
- Can you help us meet HIPAA, FTC Safeguards, CMMC, or cyber insurance requirements?
- Do you provide security awareness training for staff?
- What happens if we get breached? What is your role?
- Do you carry insurance?
- Have you actually tested disaster recovery, or just written a plan?
- What happens to old computers and hard drives when we replace them?
- Can you tell us who accessed what, if it ever came to that?
- Can we limit what each staff member can see and do?
- Our passwords are in a spreadsheet. What should we do instead?
- How do we share passwords with the team safely?
- What happens to passwords when someone leaves?
- Do we need a password manager if we already have multi-factor authentication?
- How do we store the credentials only one person knows?
- How do we find out if our credentials are already out there?
- We got an alert saying our email was in a breach. What now?
- Someone clicked a phishing link. What do we do now?
- I think we've been hacked. What do I do first?
- We have ransomware. What do we do right now?
- A payment went to the wrong account. What do we do in the next hour?
- How do we set up multi-factor authentication?
- How do we answer our cyber insurance questionnaire honestly?
- What is business email compromise, and why does it cost more than ransomware?
- How do I tell if someone is in our email?
- How do you detect a compromised mailbox before we notice?
- Why didn't our email filter catch it?
- A supplier emailed us new bank details. How do we check?
- An employee emailed asking to change their direct deposit. Is it really them?
- What should our rule be for changing where money goes?
- We think a mailbox was compromised. What do we do in the first hour?
- We are containing a security incident and need a rule changed in minutes. Then what?
Onboarding and switching
- How long does onboarding take?
- Will there be downtime during the switch?
- How do you handle the handoff from our current provider?
- What do you need from us to get started?
- Do you document our environment, and do we get a copy?
- How does onboarding work for a company with eighty people and multiple offices?
- What if our internal IT person has all the passwords and does not cooperate?
- What are you going to find in the first two weeks that we do not know about?
Ownership and control
- Do we own our licenses, domains, and data, or do you?
- If we part ways, what do we get back and how hard is it?
- Will you lock us into your tools?
- Do you resell hardware, or do we buy our own?
- Can we still administer our own systems, or does everything go through you?
- We wrote our own scripts and automation. Will you maintain them?
- If our provider manages the network, what happens to the gear when we leave?
Beyond break-fix
- What do you do besides fix things when they break?
- Do we get reporting? How often, and what is in it?
- Will you help us plan and budget for hardware and upgrades?
- How do you handle projects versus day to day support?
- Do you handle cloud, email, and file migrations?
- Do you offer strategic IT planning, or do you only react to problems?
- Can you manage our cameras, door access, and yard security, or just computers?
- How do you actually use AI, practically speaking?
- How do you keep us informed without adding to our workload?
- What can you approve and spend on our behalf without asking us?
- Our offices are not standardized, and some came from acquisitions. Can you fix that?
- If we acquire another office, how fast can you absorb it?
- We pay a lot of different technology vendors. Can you consolidate any of it?
- Who do we call for a business phone system?
- Why does our conference room never work properly?
- How do you prevent repeat problems?
- Do you use subcontractors, and who walks into our building?
Trust and credentials
- What certifications does your team hold?
- How do you measure whether clients are happy?
- Why do clients leave you?
- What do you not do?
- What is the first step if we want to talk?
- How would we know if you started coasting?
- How do we know the maintenance we cannot see is actually happening?
- How do you measure your own performance, and do we see it?
The questions people hesitate to ask
- You are going to find a mess when you look at our setup. Are you going to be difficult about it?
- I set a lot of this up myself. Are you going to rip it out and start over?
- Which of your recommendations are actually urgent, and which can wait?
- We have someone on staff who handles the small stuff. Do you take that away from them?
- Will you train our staff, or talk down to them?
- Can I meet the person who would actually be working on our account?
- How many clients does one of your technicians carry?
- What if we do not get along with the technician you assign?
- Are you planning to sell the company?
- Can you show us a restore instead of a backup report?
- Forget the guarantee in the contract. What were your actual response times last month?
- Tell us what you could sell us that we do not actually need.
- What happens when you break something?
- What do you do when you do not know the answer?
- What will still be on our plate that we are hoping will not be?
- Will your technicians treat our office manager the way they treat the owner?
- Can you evaluate our internal IT person honestly, or is that a conflict of interest?
- Who do we call for website help?
- Who do we call for QuickBooks or accounting software questions?
- When is buying IT from your internet provider actually the right call?
- Service has slipped. What do I do before I fire you?
Where we work
Service areas across Northeast Florida, and what coverage actually means.
Jacksonville and Duval County
- Who provides managed IT services in Jacksonville, FL?
- Do you support businesses in Southside, Riverside, the Beaches, and the Northside?
- How much does IT support cost in Jacksonville?
- What is the difference between managed IT services and break-fix IT support?
- Do I need a managed IT provider, or just someone to call when things break?
- Are you a local Jacksonville IT company or part of a national chain?
- How do you handle hurricane and storm season for our systems?
- Can you take over from our current Jacksonville IT provider?
St. Augustine and St. Johns County
- Do you provide managed IT services in St. Augustine?
- How long does it take you to get to a St. Augustine office?
- Do you charge extra to come to St. Augustine?
- Do you cover Ponte Vedra, Nocatee, and World Golf Village?
- Can you work around the wiring and internet limits in older downtown buildings?
- Can you help a restaurant or retail shop with point of sale and guest Wi-Fi?
- Do you support seasonal businesses whose headcount changes?
Orange Park, Green Cove Springs, and Clay County
- Who provides IT support in Green Cove Springs, FL?
- Do you support Orange Park businesses?
- What IT company covers Clay County, FL?
- How do you handle offices with limited broadband in rural Clay County?
- Can you support a business with a warehouse or shop floor, not just an office?
- Do you work with contractors, trades, and manufacturers?
- Can you help us get off an old server?
- Do you support businesses with multiple locations?
Who we work with
Support questions specific to certain kinds of businesses.
Small business IT basics
- Do we need an IT provider if we only have eight employees?
- How much should a small business spend on IT each month?
- Is outsourced IT cheaper than hiring someone in house?
- When should we stop relying on the owner or office manager for IT?
- Is a small business really a target for hackers?
- Can you support a fully remote or hybrid business?
- What IT does a brand new business need on day one?
- Can you manage just our Microsoft 365 without managing everything else?
- What happens to our IT if our one tech-savvy employee leaves?
- Do you have a minimum number of users?
- We are going from 10 to 25 people this year. What breaks first?
- We have never had real IT. Where do you even start?
- Can you help when we open a second location?
- Can our staff use their own computers?
- What does it cost to add one person?
Field service and trades contractors
- Are you experienced with our field service management software?
- How do you support field technicians working in areas with spotty connectivity?
- Do you support other HVAC, plumbing, and home services contractors?
- We run emergency calls around the clock. What does your after-hours support actually look like?
- What counts as a critical outage for a field service business, and how fast do you respond?
- Can our field techs call the help desk directly, or does everything go through the office?
- How do you secure tablets and phones if one is left at a job site or stolen from a truck?
- How do we stay PCI compliant when our techs take card payments in the field?
- We hire seasonal help in peak months. How easily can we scale licenses up and down?
- What do the first 30 days of onboarding look like for a contractor?
- Can you work around our busy season and leave everything alone during peak months?
- Our techs are hard on equipment. How do you handle that?
- Can you help us get off paper work orders?
- Our dispatch software and QuickBooks do not talk to each other. Can you fix that?
- Do you support GPS fleet tracking and truck cameras?
- Our techs' phones are on a personal plan nobody manages. Should that change?
Veterinary clinics
- Do you support veterinary practice management software?
- Can you support digital x-ray and imaging equipment on our network?
- Why does our practice software slow down during the day?
- How do we make sure patient records are backed up and recoverable?
- Can you fix Wi-Fi dead spots in exam rooms and treatment areas?
- What happens if our server goes down during appointments?
- Can you help us move our practice software to the cloud?
- Do veterinary clinics have compliance requirements like medical offices?
- Can you support us outside normal business hours, since we see emergencies?
- Do you support multi-doctor or multi-location veterinary practices?
- Do you work with emergency and specialty veterinary hospitals?
- Can you help us go chartless?
- Our cloud practice software is slow in the afternoon. Is that us or them?
- Do you support in-house lab analyzers and dental radiography?
- We board and groom. What about the point of sale and the deposits?
Dental practices
- Do you work with dental practices?
- Will you sign a Business Associate Agreement?
- Do you support Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, and the other practice management systems?
- Our practice software vendor says not to update Windows. What do you do with that?
- Sensors, CBCT, and intraoral scanners. Who owns those when they stop working?
- The server goes down at 8:15 on a Monday with a full schedule. What happens?
- What do you put in operatories, given what happens to them in there?
- HIPAA requires a security risk analysis. Do you perform it?
- We email records to labs and specialists. Is that a problem?
- Dental practices have been encrypted through their own IT vendors. What about you?
- If we are encrypted on a Monday morning, how long until we are seeing patients?
- If we ever sell to a DSO, does what you build help or hurt us in due diligence?
- Do you work with group practices and DSO-owned offices?
- We are opening a second location and want one shared schedule. What does that take?
- Our practice management vendor wants us on their cloud version. Should we?
- Who handles our phones, on-hold messages and text reminders?
- Do we still need a server?
Title and escrow companies
- Do you work with title and escrow companies?
- What do you do about wire fraud and business email compromise?
- A closer gets emailed updated wire instructions. What catches that before the money moves?
- Do you monitor for mailbox forwarding rules, impossible travel, and multi-factor changes?
- If money moves and it is fraud, what is your role in the first four hours?
- Do you know ALTA Best Practices, Pillar 3 specifically?
- Can you produce the evidence our underwriters ask for in an audit?
- Do you know where non-public personal information lives in our environment?
- Do you touch escrow accounting and reconciliation?
- Our title production software, e-recording, and lender portals. Who owns those relationships?
- Our underwriter wants a written information security program. Do you write it?
- Do you support remote online notarization?
- We share files with lenders and realtors constantly. Email or a portal?
- A closing runs at 4:55 on a Friday and the system is down. What actually happens?
- Our escrow accounting runs on one machine nobody touches. Is that safe?
Nonprofits
- Do you offer nonprofit pricing for IT support?
- Can you help us get nonprofit software grants and discounts?
- How do we handle IT on a nonprofit budget?
- Can you support an organization with a lot of volunteer turnover?
- How do we protect donor data and payment information?
- Can you help with grant requirements around data security?
- Can you support remote staff and multiple program sites?
- Can you help us with donated or aging computer equipment?
- Can you help us get the Microsoft and Google nonprofit licensing?
- Our board has to approve spending. Will you present to them?
- Our staff work from home, from program sites and from their cars. How do we protect that?
- We take card payments at a thrift store and at events. What do we need to worry about?
- Do you support donor CRM and fundraising platforms?
- Do you work with churches and private schools?
Cities, towns and special districts
- Do you work with cities, towns and special districts?
- How does buying IT services work for us? Do we have to go out for a formal RFP?
- Florida requires us to adopt cybersecurity standards. Can you get us there and document it?
- We have to report incidents to the state fast. Who makes that call and files it?
- State law says we cannot pay a ransom. What does that mean for our backups?
- Every employee needs security training within 30 days and annually. Can you run it and prove it?
- Our police department touches FDLE and CJIS systems. Can you support that?
- Everything on our systems is a public record. How does that change email and backups?
- We have state records retention schedules. Does your setup line up with them?
- Council meetings have to be noticed, open and streamed. Who do we call when the AV fails ten minutes before a meeting?
- Our water plant has SCADA on the network. Do you touch that, or does our engineer?
- Our budget year starts October 1 and council has to approve spending. How does that work?
- If city hall floods or loses power for a week, how do we keep utility billing and payroll running?
- Our one IT person also runs the phones and the copier, and they are retiring.
Home and personal computers
- Do you repair home computers and laptops?
- Is it worth repairing my computer, or should I replace it?
- Can you recover files from a computer that will not turn on?
- Can you remove a virus, or do I need a new computer?
- Can you set up a new computer and move everything over?
- Do you work on Macs?
- My laptop screen is cracked. Do you fix that?
- I got a call saying my computer is infected. Is that real?
- Can you help my parents with their computer remotely?
- Can you make my computer faster? Do you upgrade memory and drives?
- Do you take walk-ins, and what does it cost to look at my computer?