IT consulting is paid advice and design work that ends in a written deliverable, which is a different thing from a managed services agreement that keeps your systems running day to day. RJ2 Technologies is headquartered in Deer Park, Illinois, has served businesses since October 1998, and works across Chicagoland, Rockford and Northern Illinois, southeastern…

For most small and mid-sized businesses in Chicago and the northwest suburbs, a cloud migration means four specific things: email and identity move to Microsoft 365, file shares move off a Windows file server into SharePoint and OneDrive, line-of-business applications either move to a vendor-hosted version or get rehosted, and whatever is left in the…

Multi-factor authentication setup for a small business takes roughly two weeks of real work, and the order matters more than the tool: administrators first, then a pilot group of five to ten people, then everyone else, with at least one break-glass account deliberately left out and its password locked in a safe. Use an authenticator…

The five vendors a Chicago-area small or mid-market business will realistically be choosing among are SentinelOne, CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Sophos Intercept X, and Huntress. Four of those are endpoint detection and response platforms you can buy head to head. Huntress is different, and worth understanding as a managed detection layer that runs…

For most small and mid-market businesses in the Chicago area, IT compliance comes down to three or four obligations, not thirty: whatever regulation covers your data (HIPAA if you touch health information, the FTC Safeguards Rule if you do any lending or financial services, PCI DSS if you take cards), whatever your largest customers demand…

Cyber insurance carriers now treat a short list of security controls as the price of admission: multi-factor authentication on everything (email, remote access, VPN, and administrator accounts), endpoint detection and response on every machine, backups that are offline or immutable and have been test-restored, email filtering, security awareness training, a documented patching cadence, and separated…

A SOC 2 audit asks your IT function for eight categories of evidence: user access reviews, documented offboarding, logging and log retention, vulnerability scanning and remediation, change management records, vendor and subservice organization oversight, incident response with proof it was exercised, and security awareness training records. For a Type II report, you have to produce…

Zero trust architecture means no user, device or network location is trusted by default, and every request to reach an application gets evaluated at the moment it is made. In practice, an MSP building one for a Chicago business is doing five things: putting phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication on every account, blocking the legacy protocols that…