Managed IT & security for UK startups and scale-ups.

Why startups outgrow a freelance or fractional IT person

At five people, a trusted freelancer or a co-founder who’s “good with computers” is genuinely fine. The problems start somewhere around fifteen to twenty-five people, and they all arrive at once: identity sprawl across half a dozen SaaS tools, laptops that nobody has configured the same way, security questionnaires from your first enterprise customer, and a board that has started asking about cyber risk. One person cannot own all of that — and when they’re on holiday or off sick, neither can nobody.

A managed service replaces the single point of failure with a team, documented processes and an SLA you can hold us to. You stop paying for someone’s availability and start paying for an outcome: a Microsoft 365 estate that’s secure, well-run and ready for the next funding round or the next big customer.

One service: Managed IT and Managed Security together

Most providers run your IT cheaply to win the deal, then quote security as a separate project once you’re committed. We don’t. Our service bundles the helpdesk, device management, Microsoft 365 administration and the security stack — managed endpoint protection, identity hardening and a 24/7 SOC — into a single per-seat price. One bill, one SLA, one team that owns the whole thing.

Security that’s an add-on is security that gets deferred. We put it in the base price so it’s never the line a cash-conscious founder cuts.

Microsoft 365, Entra and Intune, set up properly

We build on the Microsoft stack because it’s where startups already live and it scales without re-platforming. That means Microsoft 365 for email, files and collaboration; Entra ID for single sign-on, conditional access and enforced MFA; and Intune so every laptop is enrolled, encrypted, patched and wipeable if it’s lost. Done properly, this is the foundation that makes everything else — security, compliance, fast onboarding — straightforward instead of a constant fire.

Joiner-mover-leaver at hiring speed

When you’re hiring two people a week, the boring stuff becomes the bottleneck. New starters need their laptop, accounts, licences and access ready on day one — not on day four. Leavers need to be locked out within the hour, not the following week. We run joiner-mover-leaver as a repeatable process: a new hire is provisioned with the correct Microsoft 365 licence, device policy and least-privilege access before they sit down, and an exit revokes everything the same day and preserves their mailbox and files.

Cyber Essentials for deals and due diligence

Sooner than founders expect, security stops being optional. Your first enterprise customer sends a security questionnaire. An investor’s technical due diligence asks how you manage access and incidents. Cyber Essentials — and often Cyber Essentials Plus — answers most of those questions in one certificate, and it’s mandatory for many public-sector and large-enterprise contracts. We build to the five controls from the start, so certification is a tidy-up, not a six-week panic before a deal closes.

Security from day one, not day 200

Startups are targeted precisely because attackers assume the defences are thin. Business email compromise, credential phishing and ransomware don’t wait until you’ve hired a security lead. From the first day of onboarding you get managed endpoint detection and response, identity protection across your Microsoft 365 tenant, and a SOC watching for the kind of incident that can quietly drain a runway. Read our plain-English take on EDR vs antivirus for why this matters more than it used to.

Fast onboarding, then it scales with you

Our standard onboarding is four weeks with a named lead: audit and document, secure identity and devices, then go live on helpdesk and security. After that, the model scales with your headcount — pricing is per seat, so going from twenty people to fifty is a process we already run, not a contract you have to renegotiate. You grow; the service grows with you, predictably.