Most small business IT setups look fine… until the moment something breaks

In this episode of Act on Tech, Alex breaks down why many small business networks and systems are built in a way that leaves them one failure away from complete downtime. From single routers handling everything to “server PCs” with no real backup strategy, these setups work — but only until they don’t.

This isn’t about fear — it’s about understanding risk. Alex explains how these vulnerabilities develop over time, why they’re so common, and what a more resilient setup actually looks like without over complicating things.

If your business relies on internet, files, or communication systems to operate, this is a conversation worth listening to.

Take a moment to look at your current setup — you might be closer to that “one problem” than you think.

Visit Alex Custom Tech to learn how to build a more resilient IT environment — or reach out when you're ready to take control of your infrastructure.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Are you ready to make technology work for you? Tune in to Act on Tech, the podcast where we break down the latest tech trends and show you how to boost your productivity at home and in your business. So, subscribe to Act On Tech today and visit AlexCustomTech.com to see how we can take your business to the next level. That's Act on Tech, your guide to smarter tech for a smarter business. Alex Custom Tech, IT means integrity and trust.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hi, welcome to Act on Tech, where we talk all things technology. Hi, my name is Alex of Alex Custom Tech, and today we're going to talk about something that a lot of small businesses don't realize. Your entire IT setup, your network, your files, your system might be one problem away from going down completely. In the business, we call this point of failure, and the solution is to not have one point of failure, have multiple points of failure, and I'm gonna explain to you how that works. So I'm not gonna tackle this point of failure because that's a inside IT terminology. I'm gonna type, I'm gonna title this something else, but we're gonna be talking about point of failure and why having an MSP is important. So in marketing, they talk about um and this is what they one of the things that they do, they they they talk about um pain points for for the potential clients. So you gotta talk, you gotta you gotta point out their pain points and and that will kind of motivate people to to buy into your service or product that you're that you're selling. I don't I don't like that because to me that's using fear to get people to to buy in. And that's emotional. I don't believe like most people might make decisions based off emotions. That's wrong. People should make decisions based on facts. So if I tell you that having a single point of failure in your business is a problem, that's information, that's facts, and you can then decide to yourself, okay, am I willing to live with that risk? Because so far everything is fine. I'm gonna be down maybe for a day or two when I can come back. How much that's gonna cost me? Or are you gonna say, Oh my goodness, I'm gonna have one router, let me go out and I'm gonna buy a router. That's not the response I want my clients or potential clients to make. I want them to hear what I'm saying, then think about the pros and cons of it, or what I would normally say, is it's a price you're willing to pay, and you're okay with paying that price because everything in that trade-off. That's my my my stance. Like, make a decision based on the trade-off, not based on fear and emotions. Trade-off, then you'll be fine. Then I'll be fine because then I don't think I'm manipulating anybody. Now, we've still talked about the single point of failure. So let's get into it more since I get that out of the way, because I'm not a salesperson and I don't really believe in sales as it is. I just believe in giving information and you make it the one decision because you're because you're smart enough to do so, right? So, not slowly, not partially, I'm talking full stop, complete shutdown because of one point of failure. So, how are we gonna how we how should we address this? So, we're gonna break it up into into segments or sections, right? So, first one we'll talk about is what does one problem away means or one problem away from failure means, right? What does it mean, right? So when we say a business is one problem away from failure, I mean there is a single point here it is in your system that if it breaks or when it breaks, everything stops. So we talk about routers in the last couple of um podcasts, and I talk about the the band they have on routers right now, and I kind of broke that down for you. And I talk about routers, and I say you know, routers, firewall, same thing, and we'll talk about that. So that's kind of an example of a single point of failure. So the reason why I'm pro Sumer routers, rah rah shielding, is because with pro sumo routers, there's you can connect more than one internet provider, or what you would call ISP, you can connect more than one to that router and into molt into a um uh pro suma router, and then so in case one internet goes down, yeah, the other one, it's a failover, right? So routers is an example, and the kind of router is an example. So one router handling everything is a is a single point of failure. One PC acting as your server. This is I've come across this too. Like there you have like five PCs in an office setting, and one PC of all the files on it, and everybody shares that file part. One PC is the PC is what's sharing the printer because the printer is connected to that PC, and then the printer is shared from that PC. I've seen that. If the print the computer goes down, everything goes down. So one PC acting as your server, one internet connection with no backup, no backup ISP, and we have one ISP, um, one copy of your data. This is the problem like you have one file, one copy of a file, and if you lose that file, you're down. And in that way, things fall apart, or if that anything happens, everything stops because you have the one access to one thing, or you have the one router or the one computer that's doing the work. So, kind of give you an idea. So, no access to the file, that's a problem, no access to the internet, no internet, you go down, no phones, you go down, no ability to work, right? So, if one of those things happen, everything stops, and you have to try to bring somebody in a short notice to get that stuff going again, and how long it's gonna cost you, how much money it's gonna cost you, your business is different. Can you live with it? Can you can't live with it? That's what I'm talking about. So that's how I'm presenting it in that way. So you have to look at the trade-off, right? And then see if it's worth it. Now, segment two or section two are the other part of it. So, what happens when what happens or why this happens in small business? Put it like that. Why this happens in small businesses? Well, sometimes it's cost concerned, you know, instead of paying for two different ISP, you pay for one, and you pay for one ISP, and you're gonna have one bill, right? But again, if you really really rely on the internet being up and it's really crucial to you, should you be paying for one ISP, right? So, you know, it so it works, yeah. One ISP, you know, forever then pay for it, so that's why you do it. Uh another thing why people do this sometimes too is because they set it up and it works, so you leave it alone mentally, it's mentally peaceful to think that whatever your cousin set up or whatever you did initially is working fine, so why worry about it? If not break, not fix not broke, don't fix it, right? Um, and another thing sometimes is no long-term design, so you design it one way and you're growing, but you didn't upgrade upgrade to it. That's kind of a part of a part of a bottom to it. So, yeah, so most setups grow over time, but you know, you didn't plant so there you go. So, what ends up happening really at the end of the day is that something something that works in the past don't work anymore, or instantly fall apart. So, segment three, right? Or section three, the real-world example. So, real world example, I'm like using real-world examples because I don't want people to think that I'm just like again. I don't want this to be uh salesperson point pinpoint situation, right? So, for example, we talked about this earlier. You have one router, one router fails. Your entire business depends on a single router from your ISP. What happens when the router fails? Right? No internet, no VoIP, because you can't your phone's connected to the router too, no cloud access to your to your stuff, so your entire business goes down, right? On that example, you have one PC as a file server, right? One PC setup. A lot of businesses have this one main computer, like I told you, and if it goes down, what happened? Crashes, say the PC get a ransomware, that's the worst thing. It gets a ransomware, you have nowhere to go. You want to pay the ransom, right? Or what set of the drive fail. If the file drive failing, you wasn't backing it up, everything is gone. So that's one, or you get or so somebody forgot the powerful out, the PC is locked out. What happens then? Right? Example three, you have no backup internet, right? So you're gonna have one isp, right? Your is you already have one ISP, internet outage. What happens to to your stuff, what happens to you to to all the things you're doing, right? More you happen more often than you really think. I've seen it happen to businesses before, I've seen clients before, right? So segment four, the hidden risk, false confidence, right? This is the part that's really gets people thinking. So everything feels stable because everything is working, all right, until it doesn't, so everything works fine, and then one day it stops, and you're making phone calls freaking out it was working yesterday, uh, because you're gonna have one point of failure, you're gonna have one point, that's why. And these are, I mean, like I just told you about the example in my house. I have one in one ISP and one internet provider, and the router went, and the router is old, it's a pretty old router, like I said, but it but it wasn't about it's the motor, and it went, and that's just single point of failure. So once that went down, I had to run to Best Buy and pick up a new one. You call lucky it was over the weekend. My wife works from home, so she needs the internet, so that's a that's a mission or critical hardware. And if it was during the week, she'll be out of work for that period of time. But if I'm not home and it went down, you have to wait until we come home. So again, real worse near. So that creates so because it's working all along, people might think I've created confidence that it is, but then when it goes down, they freak out, and because the design, yeah, you didn't design it to account for the failure, like you know, I didn't have a router, put it to put it, put down in in the house, so in case I'm not gonna swap it up real quick, or I never have multiple internet connections, so that one went out and kicking the other one, right? Next section, next section five, right? What is the resilience setup look like, or what does a failover system look like, or what does having multiple points of failure look like? I'll just throw those things out at you, right? Well, here's what it looks like. Here's a flip, let's flip it, right? Proper small business setup doesn't eliminate problems, it's impossible, right? I don't believe that you can, but I believe you can create a better um ratio of the pros and cons, right? So redundancy, you want to have redundancy, you want to backup internet, failover router, multiple access points. Now have you also have one access point because you have a small access, have multiple, right? You want to have backups, have some kind of backup system, right? Not just having backups, but test the backups too. I'll talk about that. I talked about talk to you about about that in other podcasts before, right? Segment your network, we'll talk about the VPNs and the not VPNs accessory network. I talk about the VLANs. You want to separate your guest network from your main office network, you want to separate your i IoT devices, you want to separate that stuff, right? And you don't want to rely on consumer gear or are for your business. You want to you want to rely on you want to get an MSP to bring stuff in or get prosumer stuff, right? And you want to monitor this stuff, you want to monitor your network to see what's going on, and it don't close your eyes on this guess. You want to monitor it, you want to check your packets, you want to have something so you can know if anything nefarious is going on, if there's any drops or in there, if any pop pockets or some ports or it's just that's everything, you know. You just want to make sure that you know what's going on, right? And and then last but not least is is the is the reason the real the real question you gotta ask yourself is so you know if one device fails, right? What happens to my business? And this is kind of where I come back to where I was talking about, where I don't believe that there's a solution in life, I believe that there's trade-offs. So if your business can work with the one point of failure, so you think to yourself and you say, Well, I don't really need two ISP, right? Because I'll just wait till it comes back up, right? That's the kind of business you have, that's fine. You can then you can say it's better for you to have the one ISP instead of paying for two isp for for that, right? But if your business rely on internet to be constantly on, you want to get two ISP because you don't want to ever have a situation where you're down. And listen, it's not hard to do the two ISP thing, believe it or not. I know sometimes um internet providers have like a monopoly particular area, but we have Starlink now, right? So you can have your or you have or you have cell phone um providers too. So you can have your your hardwired internet and then you can have a Starlink on your building, and if the hardware goes down, Starlink will kick in, and it's a temporary thing until they figure out what's going on with star with um with your with your hardwired internet ISP. So none of this stuff is impossible, it's just that it's just a way to think about it, right? And but you have to have the answer to those questions like how much pain is this gonna cause me, or what is it gonna cause me if this is I don't want to use the word pain because again, it's not pain for everybody. You have to evaluate that for yourself. Don't listen to what I'm saying here and say, Oh, I gotta go run out and do get another ISP right now. No, you have to evaluate that if that's right for you in your situation. Like I I again, my wife was from home and I did the calculation. I don't need to have two internet providers here. It would be nice to have an extra modem here, but I don't need two internet providers for my house. There's no need for that because even if she goes down, she's not the only work in her department, they can handle the work until she gets back online. She can afford to lose a deal or whatever because she works for someone. There's other people all over the world working from their home that can service their clients, so that's what I'm saying. It's different depending on your circumstances. But you have to make that call for yourself. So in a roundabout way, most business IT setup does not don't have oh, what'd I say it don't fail because of come you know complete attack or advanced problems, most of them fail because of the one point of failure, right? That's a sad thing. Sometimes that's simple, right? And it's a simple fix, right? And um they're never designed to grow, they're never designed to avoid the failure or to anticipate it or to have any redundancy, right? If you take if you take away anything from this episode, just take away that, only take away that because I again like you you have your own business and you want to just focus on what you're doing for your customers or your clients or whatever, right? You really don't want to worry about IT, right? But if you are the person doing this too, think about the redundancy, think about the the the single point of failure, or if you can if you can if you can um deal with that if that happens, right? If you can survive that, if that's something that if that's if that's a uh uh a trade-off that you can deal with, fine. But if it's not you need to get somebody like myself in at least custom tech or another another MSP in there to overlook the situation to make sure that you have redundancy and multiple points of failure so that you never go down, or the likelihood of you going down is very unlikely, right? Or if you do go down, you come back up really quickly. These are the situations that MSP would help you with. That's something to think about, right? So don't wait for something to break, find out how important it was or is, right? And do that. Like I always say, stay productive, right? If you need help with anything, of course you can reach out to me, go to Alex Custom Tech, check out what we got over there, fill out that form that's on there, and then I'll get back to you. Right? Like I always say, stay productive.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Alex Hutchinson is the founder of Alex Custom Tech and the voice behind the Act on Tech Podcast. With years of hands-on experience in technology, Alex has built a reputation for making tech simple, reliable, and practical for both small businesses and families. At Alex Custom Tech, the focus is on solutions that actually work, from secure business networking and Wi-Fi systems to VOIP phone setups, smart cameras, and complete backup strategies. Alex believes technology should empower people, not frustrate them. And his company was built on the principle that IT means integrity and trust. Clients count on Alex Custom Tech for everything, from computer repair and upgrades to designing entire business networks to protecting data against modern security threats. Whether it's a one-time project or ongoing support, Alex and his team pride themselves on being approachable, dependable, and committed to helping people stay productive. To learn more about Alex Custom Tech, visit AlexCustomTech.com, email info at alexcustomtech.com, or call 8556-686315. Looking for tech that just works and someone who keeps it real? Tune in to Act on Tech, the podcast that breaks down everyday technology in plain English. No jargon, no hype, just tools, tips, and insights to help you stay productive, stay efficient, and keep acting on tech. Need gear you can count on? Visit the Alex Recommends page at alexcustomtech.com. It's full of trusted products, from smart cameras to mini PCs, handpicked and tested by Alex himself. And when it's time to get serious about your setup, Alex Custom Tech is here to help. From small business networks to smart home installs, we've got your back. So remember, listen to Act on Tech. Shop smart with Alex Recommends, and get support from Alex Custom Tech. Stay productive, stay efficient, and keep acting on tech.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Bringing integrity and trust to every service. From network upgrades to virtualization and even relocating your IT setup, we've got you covered. Stay tuned as we put the finishing touches on our new site. Alex Custom Tech, helping your business thrive with top-notch IT support right in your backyard.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Welcome to Alex Custom Tech, your trusted partner for computer service and repair since 2010. We provide professional consulting services to clients throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, offering everything from computer repair to network design and installation. Our focus is on building efficient, results driven professional relationships with our clients. We work with you to create customized solutions that fit your specific needs, whether you're an individual or an organization. Our comprehensive IT consulting services are designed to make your technology work more. More effectively for you. We provide solutions that meet your business's performance and utilization demands. Because we understand that when your technology doesn't work, neither do you, we specialize in network design and implementation, taking the pain out of network creation, maintenance, and repair. Our team understands that even minimal downtime can impact your productivity and revenue. That's why we offer 20 or 7 proactive monitoring and maintenance to strategically optimize and protect your infrastructure. For residential and business clients, we provide affordable and reliable computer repair services, available both on site and at our location. Our commitment to quality is reflected in our satisfied customers' experiences. We service New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Alex Custom Tech is ready to serve your IT needs. Contact us today at 855-668-6315 or email info at alexcustomtech.com to discover how Alex Custom Tech can help optimize your technology solutions.