Managed IT Support in Chiswick

Chiswick’s business population is heavily weighted towards the very small: independent consultants, architects and designers, bookkeepers, coaches and one-person limited companies, working from a converted loft or a back bedroom, plus a scattering of two- and three-desk offices above the shops on the High Road. On paper these are tiny operations. In practice each one is a whole company running on a single laptop, a single broadband line and a single mailbox, with nothing in reserve. That absence of reserve is the defining risk, and it is why ongoing cover looks different here than it does for a twenty-person office. There is no colleague to borrow a machine from and no spare desk to move to. If the laptop dies on a Tuesday, billing stops on Tuesday. So the work concentrates on making a failure survivable rather than merely unlikely: a second copy of everything that exists somewhere other than the device, mail and documents held where a replacement machine can reach them within an hour, and a realistic answer to the question of what you would actually do tomorrow morning. The other recurring theme is that the line-of-business application matters more than the hardware. A practice management package, a design suite, an accounts system or a database is what actually earns the money, and when it stops nothing else being fine is much consolation. Fixing those is frequently possible without anyone travelling — a Putney firm’s SQL Server login and collation failures after a rebuild were untangled entirely over a remote session, which is generally how software faults are best handled. Connectivity is the third one, and Chiswick’s Victorian and Edwardian housing stock is unhelpful about it. Thick walls, long thin floorplans and a router installed wherever the engineer found a socket produce a study at the back of the house where calls break up. That is usually a placement and layout problem rather than a broadband speed problem, and it is worth diagnosing properly before anyone buys new equipment. Three miles from the workshop and fifteen to twenty minutes away, with late-afternoon and evening slots that suit people who commute. More on the managed IT support page, backups, the architects sector notes, and our Chiswick page.

Based in Putney (SW15), supporting Chiswick — 15–20 minutes away.