Sweet New Year, Sour Backups: Time for an Honest IT Audit
First Contact is a managed IT service provider (MSP) based in Whitefield, Manchester, founded in 2001, offering IT support, cybersecurity, and cloud services for growing businesses.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is this weekend, and first and foremost, we want to wish all our Jewish clients a happy and sweet new year. For those who don't know, it marks the start of the Jewish calendar year, and tradition holds that the days around it are for honest reflection on the year gone and a look at what didn't work, admit it, fix it. Refreshingly, nobody's IT setup could survive that level of scrutiny either.
If you've only got a minute: Every new year is a free excuse to check what's actually holding your business up before it doesn't. Below: the questions worth asking about your IT, the usual suspects that fail every single time, and why "we'll sort it next quarter" is the most expensive sentence a business can say out loud.
The problem: your IT setup runs on hope, not a plan
Most businesses only think about IT in two moments: when it breaks, or when a new starter can't log in and everyone stands around the printer looking accusingly at each other. Everything in between runs on autopilot. Which is fine, right up until autopilot flies you into a mountain.
The same offenders show up every year, like uninvited relatives:
Passwords that were "temporary" in 2019 and never left home
A backup system nobody's ever actually tried restoring from
Software licences still paying rent for three people who quit
MFA switched on for some accounts and, inexplicably, not the important ones
A "we'll sort the cloud migration next quarter" that's now on its third anniversary
None of it's dramatic. That's the whole trick. It looks fine right up until the week it very much isn't.
What to actually check, and no letting yourself off easy
A proper audit doesn't work if you're gentle with yourself, and it definitely doesn't work if you're gentle with your server room. Here's where to look:
Access. Who can get into what, and can anyone actually explain why? Former staff, old contractors, one supplier login nobody remembers creating. If the answer is a shrug, that access shouldn't exist.
Backups. Not "do we have backups," but "have we actually restored one and watched it work." An untested backup isn't a safety net, it's a rumour.
Patching. Software that's gone unpatched for a while isn't sitting there quietly minding its business. It's sitting there quietly being found.
Redundancy. If your one IT-literate employee won the lottery tomorrow and never came back, would Monday still happen? If that's a "no," you've just found this year's most important line item.
Spend. Licences, subscriptions, and tools nobody remembers signing up for. Every IT budget has at least one ghost still on the payroll.
Key takeaway
A fresh start was never really about the calendar. It's about being willing to actually look, properly, at the systems your business runs on, and fixing what you find before it decides to fix itself in the most inconvenient way possible.
If doing that review honestly sounds like more hours than you've got this month, that's the whole reason we exist. We run this audit for businesses across Manchester as a matter of routine, so you get the honesty without having to find the time, and you definitely don't have to sit through the metaphor twice.
Here's to a year where your systems behave better than your inbox.
FAQs
What is an IT audit for a small business? An IT audit is a review of a business's technology setup, covering things like user access, backups, software licensing, security settings, and system reliability, to find gaps before they cause downtime, data loss, or a security incident.
How often should a business review its IT systems? At minimum once a year, though businesses that are growing, hiring, or handling sensitive data should review more often, roughly every quarter, since staff and software changes create gaps fast.
What's the most commonly missed issue in an informal IT check? Untested backups. Most businesses have a backup system running but have never actually confirmed they can restore from it, which means the "backup" is unverified until the day it's needed most.
Why tie an IT audit to New Year at all? Any calendar milestone works as a trigger, a financial year end, a birthday, a new year. The point isn't the date, it's having a fixed moment that forces an honest look instead of letting IT run on autopilot indefinitely.
Where should a business start if it's never had a proper IT audit? Start with access and backups. Those two areas cause the most damage when neglected and are also the fastest to check. From there, a proper MSP review can cover patching, licensing, and overall system resilience.