Industries

The failure modes differ more than the technology does

We're not sector-exclusive, but these five come up most often. The stack is broadly the same in each; what changes is what an hour of downtime costs and who notices first.

Professional services

Accounting, law, architecture, engineering and agency firms where the work product is knowledge and the tolerance for downtime is close to zero.

What tends to bite

Security questionnaires arriving attached to contracts
Document access that must be tight without slowing billable work
Seasonal load — filing periods, closings, bid deadlines
Partners and principals who each have their own way of working

Composite example

Composite example: a 90-person firm across three offices asked us to answer a client’s security questionnaire. Checking who could sign in turned up eleven admin accounts for four IT-ish staff, and two former employees who could still log in.

Usual start: Security Foundation, then ongoing IT support

Property management

Residential and commercial managers running a small corporate office plus many small sites, each with its own connectivity and access needs.

What tends to bite

Sites opening and closing faster than anyone can keep up with
On-site staff turnover and shared logins
Property software, access control and cameras from different vendors
Wire-fraud attempts targeting deposits and vendor payments

Composite example

Composite example: a manager of 40 properties had building systems from six vendors, no single inventory, and no one who could say which sites still had a default administrator password.

Usual start: Ongoing IT support

Light manufacturing

Producers with an office population and a plant floor, where an outage stops output and equipment often outlives the software that supports it.

What tends to bite

Machines running operating systems the vendor stopped supporting
One network where the plant floor and the office share everything
ERP and shop-floor systems that cannot simply be restarted
Customer-driven security requirements from larger buyers

Composite example

Composite example: a two-plant manufacturer discovered during backup validation that the ERP database had been backing up successfully for eight months and had never been restore-tested. It restored — in nineteen hours.

Usual start: Security Foundation, then a part-time IT leader

Clinics and outpatient care

Multi-site clinical groups with regulated data, clinical software vendors and staff who cannot be waiting on a login while a patient is in the room.

What tends to bite

HIPAA obligations and business associate agreements
Practice management and imaging vendors with strong opinions about the network
High clinical staff turnover and rapid onboarding needs
Backup and continuity requirements that are genuinely clinical, not just financial

Composite example

Composite example: a six-location clinical group needed onboarding to complete before a clinician's first shift rather than three days after it. The fix was mostly process, not software.

Usual start: Help getting ready for a review, or Security Foundation

Multi-location retail

Retail and hospitality groups with a small head office and many storefronts, where point-of-sale uptime is revenue and every site is a little different.

What tends to bite

Point-of-sale and payment environments with their own compliance scope
Store networks installed by whoever built out the location
Seasonal hiring spikes that outpace getting people their accounts
Connectivity failures that must be diagnosed remotely

Composite example

Composite example: a 14-store group had four different firewall brands and no documented circuit list. Building the inventory took nine days and immediately explained two recurring outages.

Usual start: Ongoing IT support

Examples on this page are composites drawn from patterns across our work. They are not attributed to any real company, and we don't publish client logos or testimonials — most of our work touches things clients would prefer not be advertised. If you want references, ask on the call and we'll arrange what we can with permission.

Not on this list? Run the assessment — it depends on your size, who handles IT today, and what is going wrong.

Different sector, same question

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