“Our IT guy just left.”
Your IT person left. Here is what to do in the first two weeks.
One of our clients came to us this way. Their IT guy left town for what he described as a real job, and an attorney at the firm mentioned it at a networking meeting. Nothing was broken. Everything still worked. That was the problem. Nobody could tell what would happen the first time something did not.
When a single person has been handling your technology, their departure does not break anything immediately. It removes your ability to recover when something breaks later. Those are very different problems, and the second one is invisible until it is urgent.
Right now
What is probably true today.
Based on what we find in businesses that arrive this way. Not all of it will apply. Enough of it usually does.
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Administrator accounts still exist in his name, with working passwords, at every vendor and inside your own systems.
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Software licenses and domain renewals are tied to his email address. Some will lapse without warning; some will renew to a mailbox nobody reads.
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There is no documentation. What existed lived in his head, and the parts that were written down are probably out of date.
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Backups are running, or appear to be. Nobody currently employed knows whether a restore has ever been tested.
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At least one system depends on a machine, a script, or a scheduled task nobody knows exists until it stops.
Regardless of who you hire
What to do this week.
None of this requires us. Do it yourself, or hand it to whoever helps you with technology.
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1
Change the passwords you can find, and write down the ones you cannot
Start with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, your domain registrar, your firewall, and your backup system. The list of accounts you cannot get into is more useful than the list you can. It tells you exactly where you are exposed.
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2
Find out where the domain name is registered
Losing control of a domain is one of the few genuinely unrecoverable situations. If it was registered under a personal account, sorting that out is more urgent than almost anything else on this list.
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3
Confirm the backups by restoring something
Not by looking at a dashboard. Pick a real file, restore it, open it. If nobody can work out how, that is your answer and you have found it in a calm week rather than a bad one.
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4
Write down what you do not know
Every unanswered question is a finding. Bring that list to whoever you hire next. It will tell them more about your environment than any interview.
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If you would rather not work through it alone
Fifteen minutes, and we will tell you what we would do.
No pitch on the first call. Tell us what happened and we will tell you honestly how serious it is, what we would tackle first, and whether you need an assessment at all.
No pitch on the first call. If we are not a fit, we will say so and point you somewhere better.