IT services in Bound Brook, NJ

Bound Brook is a small borough, under two square miles, built along the Raritan with its downtown on Main Street and a Raritan Valley Line station. The businesses here are mostly small and independent: storefronts, services and offices with a handful of people. Downtown has also added hundreds of new apartments in recent years.

Bound Brook has learned the hard way that a downtown can lose access to its own buildings. In January 2020 a fire that started in an apartment building under construction on East Main Street spread to neighboring buildings, and the three-block stretch of Main Street stayed closed for a month while debris was cleared. Shops on that stretch that weren't touched by the fire still lost a month of street access and foot traffic. That's what our first section is about.

Can the business keep running if you can't get into the building?

Most disaster planning assumes the computers are damaged. The more common situation is less dramatic and just as costly: the equipment is fine, but the street is closed, the power is off, or the building isn't safe to enter. For a month, a server in the back room might as well not exist.

The test is simple: if nobody could enter the shop for four weeks starting tomorrow, what could you still do from a kitchen table? Can you answer the business phone line? Can you see your appointments, invoices, customer list and email? Can you take a card payment somewhere else? For many small businesses the honest answer is no, because all of it lives on one machine or one phone line inside the building.

Making the answer yes isn't expensive. Forward the business number to a mobile, or move to a phone service that rings anywhere. Move the books, the customer records and the email to cloud services that work from any laptop. Keep a card reader that runs on cellular instead of the shop's internet. Make sure more than one person has the passwords. None of this is about the building. It's about the business not depending on the building.

When one computer does every job

In a lot of small shops, one computer behind the counter runs everything. It handles the point-of-sale software and the bookkeeping, it answers email, it prints labels, and in the evening someone in the family uses it for everything else. It works fine until it doesn't, and when it goes, every part of the business goes with it.

Usually the problem isn't the hardware. It's that nothing is separated: one Windows login, saved passwords for the bank and the supplier portal in a browser everyone uses, and no backup because nobody remembers setting one up. One bad download on that machine reaches the books, the customer list, and the bank login at the same time.

The fix doesn't have to mean a second computer, though that sometimes helps. Give the business its own user account with a password, move personal browsing to a separate account or device, back up the business data off the machine, and write down which software has licenses that would need moving if the computer died. Then a dead machine costs you a morning instead of a week.

What we most often help with in Bound Brook

• Continuity setup so a closed building doesn't close the business: phone forwarding, cloud records, cellular card readers
• Backup for shops whose records live on one counter computer
• Separating business and personal use on shared computers
• Small-office and storefront networks along Main Street
• Computer repair, virus and pop-up cleanup, and data recovery
• Home Wi-Fi and computer support across the borough

Getting to you in Bound Brook

Bound Brook is around half an hour from North Brunswick. On-site work is scheduled rather than same-day, and for storefronts we'll try to come before opening or after close so you're not working around us. A lot of what we've described, like phone forwarding, cloud setup and account changes, can be done remotely, so distance matters less than you'd think.

Common questions from Bound Brook

• If our street gets closed again, what can we set up now so we can keep working?

  Three things matter most. First, get the business phone number able to ring on a mobile. Second, get your bookkeeping, customer records and email into services you can open from any laptop. Third, get a card reader that works over cellular. Then make sure at least two people can log in to each of those. It's a small project, and most of it can be done without anyone visiting the shop.

• Our shop computer does everything, including the register. What happens if it dies?

  Right now, probably a lost week: buying a machine, reinstalling the point-of-sale and accounting software, finding license keys, and hoping the data can be recovered from the old drive. With a current backup kept off the machine and a written list of software and licenses, it's a morning. If the register depends on that computer, we'd also check whether a spare or a cloud-based register makes sense.

• We have an apartment upstairs and the shop downstairs. Can we share one internet connection?

  You can share the line, but don't share the network. The shop's register, card reader and business computer should be on their own network, separate from the apartment's phones, TVs and guests. Most decent routers can run two separate networks from one connection. If the card reader is on the same network as everyone's devices, that's the first thing we'd change.

• Do you work with very small businesses, like one or two people?

  Yes, and in a borough like Bound Brook that's most of the businesses. A one- or two-person business doesn't need a managed IT contract. It usually needs a backup that works, a couple of accounts set up properly, and someone to call when something breaks. We're happy to do exactly that much.