Servers, a local Active Directory, and a floor of printers, managed as their IT team

The situation

Before us, this was looked after by a freelancer who would drop by "sometime this week", with a mailbox full of "should be working again". Backups ran on a NAS where nobody had checked the green LEDs in two years. AD rights were an organically grown jungle: departed staff still sat in the "Domain Admins" group because removing them felt risky.

The printers mostly worked. Their updates didn't. Drivers had been installed by hand, with the install intern's username from 2019 still in the log.

The question was not "should we move everything to the cloud". The question was "can someone just manage this properly".

What we did

We took over management as their IT team.

**Servers and domain**: AD cleaned up (role-based, no loose rights), patch cycle via WSUS, backup monitoring with daily reports, 24/7 monitoring on the file servers and the domain controller.

**Endpoints and MFA**: all workstations under central software deploy, automatic patches, endpoint protection (Defender for Business). MFA rolled out across all accounts, recovery codes kept in a password manager with audit logging.

**Printers**: drivers standardised, firmware updates automated, certificates renewed centrally, scan-to-mail working on all six machines.

**Cloud tenants alongside**: their Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant run under the same retainer, so license changes, mail flow, and cloud storage are managed by one party.

Quarterly on-site health check with a report, ad-hoc support during business hours via mail/phone/portal, on-site when the hardware deserves it.

What it delivered

The quiet kind of outcomes:

- Backups that are tested (and once actually needed when a file server lost a disk). - AD where every employee has exactly the rights their role calls for, and nothing else. - Printers that update without anyone physically going to the office. - Patches landing on all endpoints within two weeks, instead of "maybe sometime this quarter". - One invoice a month for the whole IT layer, instead of five separate vendors with overlap.

No platform reseller, no MSP licenses that scale per seat. We do the work, you pay for the work.

What this wasn't

Not "everything to the cloud, hardware gone". Not vendor lock-in on a management platform you can never leave. Not a freelancer who'll "swing by next week". What it was: their on-prem hardware and their cloud tenants managed as a single department, with logs, monitoring, and hands on the kit.