A small business rarely loses money to anything dramatic. It loses money because a payment went to a bank account nobody checked, because the machine holding the day book got encrypted on a Friday, or because six years of records lived on one drive that finally stopped spinning. ServiceShield IT runs the plant that catches those, and runs it the way a box is worked: signalled, written down, and staffed while it matters.
Absolute block working: one section, one train, and no lever pulled until the section ahead has reported itself empty.
None of these needs a hooded stranger or a clever exploit. Each is an ordinary trading day that went wrong in one particular way, and they are the ones we get asked about most.
Somebody sat on a mail thread for six weeks, waited until a genuine invoice came up for discussion, then posted a near identical one carrying different bank details. Nothing was hacked in the sense the word implies. A payment merely went somewhere else, and the money had gone before a telephone was picked up.
The machine that takes card payments and holds the day book is the machine that gets encrypted, and it happens on the afternoon when the person who understands it has already left for the weekend. Two days of trade sit behind that screen.
A member of staff left in the spring. Their mail account is still live, still forwarding, still trusted by every supplier who ever wrote to it. Nobody removed it because nobody owned the job of removing it.
Six years of quotes, photographs, statements and correspondence sitting on one external disk that has never been copied anywhere. Everyone knows. Everyone has agreed, without saying so, to worry about it later.
Every section is written up on its own page: what its levers do, what a unit costs each month, and precisely where cover runs out. Nothing here comes bundled. Pull two levers or pull twenty, the arithmetic works the same way, on a single monthly invoice.
Agents down on the machines, one place where the signals get tied together, and a staffed desk that acts on what comes back instead of posting you a graph.
Approved software runs. Anything else waits on a person saying yes. That is the entire idea, and it turns out to stop a remarkable share of what walks past everything else.
Protection sitting at mailbox level within whichever Microsoft or Google tenant you already own, with training for people who have four seconds to judge a message.
Patched machines, filtered browsing, Apple kit under management, and phones somebody genuinely looks after.
Find where sensitive material has actually settled before attempting to govern it, then put controls on the routes it would leave along.
Copies kept at a distance from the systems in question, and a restore somebody really attempts instead of assuming.
There is a fashion in this trade for hinting that the software came out of a workshop upstairs. Ours did not. What sits beneath ServiceShield IT is commercial plant, chosen because it stands up when leaned on, licensed by Fortify 24x7, and worked by people who spend the whole day watching it. Naming the makers, and handing over a telephone number, beats any sealed cabinet.
Conduct judged on the endpoint, with action taken there as well, across each operating system in the frame and on cluster nodes besides.
Sources correlated and kept, so one alert turns up carrying its neighbours instead of standing on its own.
Allowlisting, ringfencing and elevation, applied to whichever machines would be worst to lose.
Mailbox-level API protection working inside the tenant you own. It is no gateway, and this page is not going to imply that it is.
Watching and patching, scripting, remote hands, plus filtering of the web, all of it riding one agent.
Looking after Mac and iPad estates that stayed unmanaged quite long enough.
Threat defence living on the handset, covering iOS and Android kit that your people happen to read mail on.
Turns up regulated material, puts an exposure figure against a machine, and encrypts along the routes files travel.
Disk and file copies pulled off workstations, real servers, hypervisor guests, and one Microsoft tenant.
Copies taken of a Workspace tenant, of directory configuration held in Entra ID, and of whatever a QuickBooks Online ledger holds.
There is no committee in any of this and nobody appoints a project manager. Most firms are covered and running quietly inside a fortnight, and whatever drags is nearly always tuning rather than fitting.
A short conversation. How many machines, running what, who keeps the keys, and what would actually stop trade if it walked out of the door. You leave with a list of levers against a monthly figure, and no slide deck.
Levers get picked here and settled by card. Stripe collects the details on its own page, which we never lay eyes on. Billing falls monthly, before the period rather than after, under the descriptor FORTIFY 24X7.
Installers plus enrolment links arrive in your register, usually inside the same working day. Windows, Linux, macOS and mobile go four different ways round, and none of the four wants you sitting in front of a console.
Allowlists bed down, filters acquire their exceptions, and copy schedules are sized against the volume genuinely on your disks. This is the stretch that decides whether the whole thing runs quiet or noisy.
Alerts reach our desk and stop reaching your inbox. You keep the register for subscriptions, for installers, and for whatever you have written up, with somebody answering at the far end.
Any security page you opened this month promised to keep you entirely safe. This one declines, because entire safety is not a product on anybody's shelf. Printed below is the honest edge of a monthly subscription.
Figures are read live out of the billing system, so the number on a plate is the number you get charged. Put levers on the sheet, adjust the counts inside the panel, then settle once it reads right. The result is a single subscription, taken each month.
Six levers. Endpoints, then cluster nodes, at three separate grades of response. Open this section.
One lever. Software you approved runs, and nothing else gets a vote on it. Open this section.
Two levers. Find where the sensitive material sits, then rule on where it can travel. Open this section.
Two levers. Protection at the mailbox, plus the training that belongs next to it. Open this section.
Four levers. Windows, Apple and mobile: patched, filtered, and on the books. Open this section.
Nine levers. Machines and servers, plus whichever cloud accounts get forgotten about. Open this section.
Heads up: card statements show FORTIFY 24X7 - ServiceShield IT is a Fortify 24x7 brand, and your subscription is billed by Fortify 24x7.