Reliable IT foundations and practical cybersecurity for growing businesses. We fix problems and prevent them from recurring.
IT problems waste time, frustrate staff, and create risk. Stackwise provides practical IT support for SMEs — covering devices, email, cloud platforms, user access, backups, cybersecurity, and proactive maintenance.
We do not just fix problems when they occur. We identify and address the underlying issues that cause recurring IT disruptions.
Most SMEs are more vulnerable than they realise. Stackwise identifies and addresses the most common security gaps.
Review of current security posture — passwords, MFA, software updates, user permissions, email security, and endpoint protection.
Implementation of a business password manager so staff use strong, unique passwords without the security risk of shared or reused passwords.
MFA setup for email, cloud platforms, and critical business systems — the single most effective security improvement for most SMEs.
Review of current backup status and implementation of a reliable, tested backup system for critical business data.
Antivirus, device encryption, and endpoint protection for business devices — especially important for remote and hybrid teams.
Practical guidance on data storage, access control, and handling of personal information in line with POPIA requirements.
Most SMEs do not need an IT department. They need someone to make sure the boring things are done properly, so that a bad day stays a bad day instead of becoming a bad month.
Small businesses are targeted precisely because they are assumed to be unprotected. The baseline is not exotic and it is not expensive: multi-factor authentication on every account that supports it, operating systems and software kept patched, endpoint protection that is actually running and actually reporting, and email security configured to reduce the volume of impersonation and phishing that reaches your staff.
We check what is in place, what is missing, and what is switched on but misconfigured — which is more common than either of the other two.
A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a backup. The working principle is three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one of them off-site. We check that your backups cover what you assume they cover — email and cloud files included, since these are frequently left out — that they run without someone remembering to start them, and that a restore has been tested rather than assumed.
Continuity here has a local flavour. We look at what happens to your router, your connectivity and your critical machines when the power goes, whether staff can work from elsewhere when they need to, and whether anything in your setup depends on a single piece of equipment in a single building. The aim is not gold-plating; it is knowing which failures you have chosen to accept and which you have not.
Most SMEs are paying for licences they no longer use, and carrying mailboxes belonging to people who left. We audit what you are paying for against what you are using, check that departed staff no longer have access to anything, review sharing permissions on cloud storage, and make sure administrator accounts are not being used for day-to-day work.
Section 19 of POPIA requires a responsible party to secure the integrity and confidentiality of personal information through appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures. In practice that means the items above, plus knowing where personal information actually lives in your business and who can reach it. We map that and identify the gaps. Where an issue is a legal question rather than a technical one, we say so and recommend you take advice on it.
| Area | What we look for | What it costs when it is wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Account security | MFA coverage, password reuse, dormant and ex-staff accounts | One compromised mailbox is enough for invoice fraud |
| Backups | Coverage, automation, off-site copy, a tested restore | Ransomware or hardware failure becomes unrecoverable |
| Patching | Operating systems, browsers, business applications, firmware | Known vulnerabilities left open for months |
| Email security | SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, phishing filtering | Your domain gets spoofed and your customers get defrauded |
| Access control | Who can reach what, admin accounts, file sharing links | Data leaves quietly with departing staff |
| Continuity | Power, connectivity, single points of failure | A full day lost to something that was foreseeable |
| Licensing | What you pay for versus what you use | Money out the door every month, indefinitely |
We assess your current setup across security, backups, access, continuity and licensing, and put the findings in writing.
We rank the gaps by risk and by effort. Several of the highest-impact items are configuration changes that cost nothing.
We implement the agreed fixes, coordinating certified partners where specialist or accredited work is required.
Ongoing monitoring, patching and periodic review, so the baseline does not quietly decay over the following year.
Not necessarily. Many clients keep their existing provider for hands-on support and use us for the strategic layer — reviewing what is in place, identifying gaps, and making sure IT decisions fit the wider business plan. Where specialist or accredited work is needed we coordinate with certified partners rather than pretending to do everything ourselves.
Yes, and size is the reason rather than the exemption. Attacks on small businesses are overwhelmingly automated and opportunistic — they look for unpatched systems and accounts without multi-factor authentication, not for big names. Invoice interception fraud in particular targets small businesses precisely because the controls are usually weaker.
In short, to take appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information you hold, and to be able to show that you have. That means securing accounts and devices, controlling who can access what, keeping backups, and knowing where personal information sits in your business. We map and address the practical side. For the legal interpretation you should take proper advice — we will tell you plainly when a question falls into that category.
By being deliberate about it. Keep the router and one working machine on backup power rather than trying to power everything; make sure cloud-based systems are genuinely reachable from a phone or from home; and know in advance which functions simply pause. The expensive mistake is discovering the gaps during an outage instead of planning for them.
Yes. The immediate priorities are containing the incident, working out what was accessed, and restoring operations. After that we deal with the cause, because an incident is nearly always a symptom of a gap that was already there. If a breach involves personal information, POPIA notification obligations may apply and that should be assessed promptly.