For a manufacturer, IT isn’t email and spreadsheets — it’s the systems that keep production moving. We support the whole estate: the office network, the ERP, the ageing machine PC that can’t be replaced, and the security your biggest customers now demand.
Manufacturing IT is a different discipline. The estate is almost never clean: modern laptops and Microsoft 365 in the office, an ERP or MRP system that runs the business, CAD workstations engineering can’t work without, and somewhere on the shopfloor a machine controller running an operating system that went out of support years ago — but drives half a million pounds of equipment. Generic office-IT providers treat that mix as a problem to apologise for. We treat it as the job.
There’s a security dimension too. Manufacturing is consistently among the most-targeted sectors in the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey, precisely because downtime is so expensive that criminals assume you’ll pay to end it. And your largest customers know it — which is why supply-chain security questionnaires, Cyber Essentials requirements and insurer scrutiny keep landing on your desk.
The four things manufacturing and engineering clients lean on us for hardest.
Manufacturers are prime ransomware targets because production downtime forces quick decisions. Tested backups, a rehearsed response and senior hands who’ve worked live incidents.
On-prem servers still doing real work, industrial networks, secure remote access for engineers and suppliers — modernised at a pace production can tolerate.
Increasingly a condition of automotive, aerospace, defence and public-sector work. We get you certified, with remediation built into onboarding.
Production doesn’t run nine to five, and neither do its problems. Support arrangements shaped around how your site actually operates.
Three principles that shape every manufacturing environment we look after.
Office IT recovers from an hour’s downtime. A production line often doesn’t. We prioritise, monitor and design around the systems that make you money — not the ones that are easiest to support.
That end-of-life machine controller can’t just be “upgraded” — and pretending otherwise is how providers lose trust. We isolate and segment what can’t change, so old kit can’t endanger the rest of the network.
Customer security questionnaires, audit requests and insurer demands answered properly, with evidence — so security becomes something that wins you contracts rather than delays them.
Yes — realistically, not recklessly. Plenty of manufacturing kit depends on control software that only runs on out-of-support operating systems, and replacing the machine is rarely a near-term option. The answer isn’t to ignore it; it’s to contain it: network segmentation so the machine can’t reach (or be reached from) anything it doesn’t need, no email or browsing on those systems, and monitoring so change gets noticed. That’s the approach we take, and it’s also the approach Cyber Essentials expects for unsupported kit.
Yes. Supply-chain security assessments from large customers — automotive, aerospace, defence, public sector — are now routine, and answering them badly (or slowly) puts contracts at risk. We complete them with you, truthfully, and where there are gaps we’ll tell you what closing them involves. Over time the goal is that the answers are simply “yes” because the controls genuinely exist — which is what our security baseline and Cyber Essentials work builds towards.
We design the support arrangement around your operating pattern rather than forcing you into ours. That starts with prevention — monitoring that spots failing kit before a shift finds it — and includes agreeing honestly, up front, what’s covered outside office hours and what the response looks like. What we won’t do is sell you a “24/7” badge that turns out to be an answering service. Our published response targets set out what we commit to during support hours.
No — and any plan that requires it hasn’t been thought through. Modernisation in a manufacturing environment is sequenced around production: changes staged out of hours or in maintenance windows, rollback plans for anything touching operational systems, and the shopfloor treated as the constraint it really is. It takes longer on paper and goes wrong far less in practice.
He’s been an incredible support through a difficult period — we’re genuinely grateful for the hard work and dedication.
Career feedback from our founder’s client work. Identities withheld to respect confidentiality. References available on request.
A straight conversation about your estate — what’s solid, what’s fragile, what your customers are asking for, and how we’d support it without stopping production.