The server nobody wants to touch
Almost every business we look at has one. A machine in a comms room or under a stairs that runs something important. It has not been changed in years. Nobody is completely sure what depends on it, and nobody wants to be the person who finds out.
It is not a fault. It is a risk, and risk can be measured.
Three questions worth answering this month
What happens on the day it stops? Which parts of the operation pause, and for how long.
How long would recovery actually take? Not the backup schedule. The time from failure to people working again, including getting hardware, restoring data and checking it.
Who is responsible? If broadband comes from one company, phones from another and the network from a third, there is often nobody accountable for the property working as a whole.
If you cannot answer those three, that is the finding. You do not need a project to start. You need the picture.
Cloud is not automatically the answer
For some workloads it clearly is. For businesses with production lines, tills, cameras, door systems and local devices, an all or nothing move usually costs more and performs worse than a considered mix. The useful question is not where the server should live. It is what has to keep working when the connection to the outside world does not.
Backups deserve a separate sentence
A backup that has never been restored is a plan, not a protection. The only meaningful test is an actual restore, and it should be done on a day nothing is wrong.
What a review gives you
We look at what is running, what depends on it, the condition and remaining life of the key equipment, where a single failure would stop the operation, whether backups would genuinely bring you back, and how the network and WiFi design matches how the building is actually used. Then a prioritised plan with the urgent work separated from the eventual work, written in language a board will understand.
Nothing about that requires you to commit to a replacement. It just means the next decision is made with information rather than nerves.
FAQ
Our IT provider looks after this. Why would we need a review?
Often the provider is doing their own part well and nobody is looking at the whole environment. A review is not a criticism of them, it is a second set of eyes on the parts nobody owns.
The server is old but nothing has gone wrong. Is that not fine?
It is fine right up until it is not. The point of the exercise is to know the cost of the bad day before it arrives, so the decision to spend or not spend is deliberate.