The four failures we see in this sector.
Not hypotheticals. These are the findings that come up again and again on first documentation.
Client site, home, airport. Access rules written for one office quietly block half the firm, so people route around them with personal accounts.
Files come by email, by link, by USB stick. Without a defined landing place, client material spreads to personal drives within a week.
An hour of downtime is an hour nobody bills. The business case for monitoring is arithmetic, not fear.
Three people start the same Monday. Onboarding needs to be a documented ten-minute sequence, not an afternoon of guessing which licences to buy.
What we put in place
Six things, in orderConditional access built for people who travel, with MFA that does not punish them for it and device compliance that keeps client data off unmanaged laptops.
Structured by client and engagement, with external sharing controls and links that expire — so a handover is not an archaeology project.
A documented sequence with the licence, the group, the folders, and the equipment. Same result whoever runs it.
Retention matched to how long you contractually keep client material, and restores tested monthly rather than assumed.
Quarterly licence review. Firms hiring in bursts almost always carry seats for people who left and tiers nobody uses.
Register, diagrams, tenant ownership. Useful in day-to-day work, and a due-diligence asset if you ever sell or merge.
Professional services questions
We are fully remote. Do we still need documentation?
More, not less. With no office to walk into, the register and the diagram are the only reliable description of how your firm runs.
Can you support people travelling internationally?
Yes, with conditional access rules that allow travel without leaving the door open. We will show you the trade-offs rather than decide for you.
Do you handle device purchasing?
We specify and configure; you buy direct. We take no hardware margin, which keeps the advice honest.
How fast is onboarding a new starter?
Once the runbook exists, about ten minutes of engineer time. The first one takes a couple of hours because we are writing the runbook.