Grade your own setup in five minutes
Twelve questions, the same twelve we run on every network we take over. You get your result on screen straight away — no email needed to see it.
“I don’t know” is a real answer. It scores amber, because not knowing is its own risk.
Backups
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Want this written up properly?
We will email you a two-page report built from the answers you just gave: your twelve results, what each red item would actually cost you if it failed, and what putting it right involves. Plain English, so you can hand it to a partner or a board without translating it.
Want the checklist in your inbox? We will email you all twelve checks so you can work through them offline.
These are the twelve things we check in a free assessment. You can work through them yourself, right now, without talking to anybody. If everything comes back green, you are in better shape than most businesses we see.
Be honest with the answers. A checklist you pass by being generous with yourself is worse than not doing it at all.
Backups — the four that matter most
More businesses are ended by a bad backup than by a clever attacker. Start here.
- 1. Is there a backup at all? Name what is backed up, what it runs on, and how often. “The server is backed up” is not an answer if nobody can say to where.
- 2. Is there a copy somewhere else? A backup sitting on a drive next to the server is one fire, flood or theft away from being no backup.
- 3. Can that copy be deleted? If someone with your administrator password could erase the backups, so can ransomware. An immutable copy cannot be deleted by anyone, including you, until it expires.
- 4. When did someone last restore a file from it? Not “is the job green” — has a human actually pulled a file back and opened it. If the answer is never, you have a backup you are hoping works.
Accounts and Microsoft 365
This is where attacks against small businesses actually land. Not malware — someone logging in as you.
- 5. Is multi-factor authentication switched on for everyone? Available is not the same as enforced. That includes the owner, who is usually the exception and usually the target.
- 6. How many people have full administrator rights? Count them. If it is more than two, you have more keys to the building than you need.
- 7. Can anyone who has left still log in? Ask who removes accounts when someone leaves, and check the last three people who left.
- 8. Is your Microsoft 365 or Google data backed up? Most people assume Microsoft does this. Microsoft keeps the service running; recovering a mailbox somebody emptied last month is your problem.
Network and computers
- 9. What is your firewall, and when was it last updated? If nobody knows the model, that is the finding. Firewalls stop getting security updates once the manufacturer ends support.
- 10. Is guest wi-fi separate from business wi-fi? If a visitor’s laptop can see your server, it is not a guest network.
- 11. Is anything still running software past its end of life? Windows 10 reached end of support in October 2025. Unsupported means no more security patches, ever.
- 12. Is your antivirus being watched, or just installed? Endpoint protection raises alerts. If nobody reads them, it is a smoke alarm in an empty house.
How to read your answers
Mark each one green if it is genuinely in place and you could prove it, amber if it is partly there or you are not sure, and red if it is absent.
Any red in the backup section is worth dealing with before anything else on this list. A red on multi-factor authentication is the next one. Everything else can be planned.
Being honest about the ambers is the point of the exercise. “Not sure” is the most common real answer to questions 3, 4, 7 and 8, and each one is worth resolving.
If you would rather we ran it
The free assessment is the same twelve checks, done with you in half an hour, and you get the findings written up within one business day. There is no obligation and no sales call unless you ask for one. If it turns out everything is in good order, we will tell you that and you will have it in writing.
Rather have us run it?
The assessment is free and costs you under an hour. We run all twelve checks, then send a two-page report: what is green, what is amber, what is red, and what each red item would cost you if it failed on a Monday morning. No obligation to hire us afterwards.