Most startups begin with a handful of laptops, a shared drive and a growing list of software subscriptions, and that is fine right up until the team reaches ten or fifteen people and the slow Wi-Fi, lost files and forgotten passwords start eating into everyone’s working day. It costs far less to sort your IT out before something breaks than after, so here is what to put in place and roughly the order to do it in.
Networking
Everything else you run depends on your network, and the basic router your internet provider sent you will struggle once you have dozens of devices, video calls and cloud tools all competing for the same connection. A proper business router and firewall from a brand like Ubiquiti, Meraki or Fortinet will give you far more control over your traffic, along with features such as content filtering, VPN access for remote staff and clear logs of what is happening on the network.
Wi-Fi is where most offices go wrong, because a single access point in a corner might cover the room on paper but falls over once everyone is on video calls at the same time. As a rough guide you want one access point for every 25 to 30 users, mounted on the ceiling and wired back to a managed PoE switch with proper Cat6 cabling, since running Wi-Fi through repeaters or powerline adapters causes exactly the dropouts you are trying to avoid.
Servers
Whether you need your own servers depends on what your business does. Plenty of startups run everything in the cloud, and that makes sense if your workload is unpredictable or you don’t want big upfront costs, but if your usage is steady, you store a lot of data, or your monthly cloud bill keeps creeping up, owning the hardware can work out cheaper over a few years. A useful test is to compare what you pay for cloud compute and storage over 36 months against the price of a server, its licences and someone’s time to look after it, and if the cloud figure is more than double, it’s definitely worth taking this on board.
If you do go down that route, a rack server is usually the best fit because it takes up little space, is easy to upgrade and sits neatly in a small comms cabinet. Refurbished machines can save you a lot of money without much drop in performance, particularly since business servers are built to run for years, and you can look through some Dell Rack Servers to see what specs and prices to expect. Most startups do well with a single 1U or 2U machine running a hypervisor such as Proxmox, Hyper-V or VMware, which lets you split it into several virtual machines for things like a file server, a database, and internal tools.
Backups
Losing your data is one of the few mistakes an up-and-coming company can’t always bounce back from, so keep three copies of everything, store them on two different types of storage, and make sure one copy lives somewhere away from your office. This is known as the 3-2-1 rule, and it covers you for most things that can go wrong, from a failed drive to a fire or a break-in.
Cloud storage like Dropbox or OneDrive isn’t a backup by itself, since if someone deletes a folder or ransomware locks your files, the damage can spread to every synced device within minutes. The same applies to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, because they keep your data available but don’t protect you well against accidental deletion or a compromised account, so a third-party backup tool for your email, documents, and shared drives is worth paying for.
Security
You don’t need a big budget for security in the early days, but a few basics make a huge difference. Switch on two-step login for every account that offers it, starting with email, your cloud accounts and wherever your code is stored, and use an authenticator app or hardware key rather than text messages, which can be intercepted. Give everyone a password manager such as 1Password or Bitwarden so nobody is reusing the same password or keeping a list in a spreadsheet, and use it to share logins for team accounts instead of pasting them into chat.
Put endpoint protection on every device, which today usually means something like Microsoft Defender for Business, SentinelOne or CrowdStrike rather than old-style antivirus, and keep operating systems and software updated automatically wherever you can.
Managing Accounts and Devices
Once you have more than a few staff, creating and removing accounts one at a time gets messy quickly. A central system such as Microsoft 365 with Entra ID, or Google Workspace, lets you handle all of it from one place, and if you connect your other tools to it, people can log in to everything with a single account, which also means that when someone leaves, you can shut off their access in one step.
It’s also worth using a device management tool such as Intune, Jamf or Kandji, which lets you push updates to laptops and phones, force screen locks and wipe a device remotely if it goes missing. It also makes hiring simpler, because a new starter can unbox a laptop, sign in, and have their apps and settings appear without anyone in your team setting it up by hand.
Monitoring and Support
Simple monitoring can warn you when a server is running out of disk space, a backup has failed, a certificate is about to expire or a network device has dropped offline, ideally before anyone on the team notices. Tools like Uptime Kuma, PRTG or Zabbix are enough for most small setups, and the important part is that alerts go to a shared inbox or chat channel where someone will actually see them.
Plan for Growth
Buy for where you expect to be in two years rather than where you are now, which means equipment you can upgrade, licences that scale as you hire and a network with some room to spare. A sensible rule is to leave around 30 percent of spare capacity in your storage, switch ports and server resources, so that a burst of hiring or a new project doesn’t force an emergency purchase.
