When you start a business, the technology decisions get made in a hurry and then live
with you for years. These five are the ones worth ten minutes of thought each, because
changing them later is disruptive in a way the others aren’t.

1. Get your own domain and email before anything else

Not a free webmail address with your business name in it. Your own domain, with email on
it. It costs very little, it’s the thing customers judge you on before they’ve met you, and
it means your business identity isn’t sitting inside an account you don’t control.

Register the domain in your own name, not your web designer’s. This matters more than it
sounds: recovering a domain registered to someone you’ve fallen out with is genuinely
difficult.

2. Pick one place for files and use only it

Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace — either is fine. What isn’t fine is half the business
on one, half on the other, and the important documents on someone’s desktop. Decide once,
put everything there, and make it the rule.

3. Separate business from personal now

Separate accounts, separate logins, ideally separate devices once you can justify it.
When someone leaves, or a device is lost, or an account is compromised, the boundary is
what limits the damage — and drawing it later means untangling years of overlap.

4. Decide how you’ll get things back

Cloud storage is not a backup. It syncs, which means it faithfully copies your mistakes
and any ransomware along with your files. You need a copy that a bad day can’t reach, and
you need to have restored from it at least once so you know it works.

5. Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere, from day one

It’s far easier to start with it than to introduce it later to staff who’ve grown used to
logging in without it. Cover email, banking, your accounting software and your domain
registrar at minimum.

What to leave until later

Almost everything else. You don’t need a server, and you probably don’t need most of the
software you’ll be sold in your first year. Start deliberately small — it’s much easier to
add a system you’ve discovered you need than to unpick one you never did.

Once there are staff and real customer data involved, the security and maintenance side
stops being a one-afternoon job. That’s the point to talk to a managed IT provider —
securenerds.com covers
that end for small businesses. For hands-on setup around Adelaide, getting the machines,
network and email working properly in the first place, that’s us on 08 7094 4824.