When you started your business, your IT was probably simple. A laptop, an email address, maybe a shared drive. It worked because it only had to support one or two people doing straightforward things.
Then the business grew. More staff, more devices, more data, more things that depend on everything working. The IT did not grow with it. And now you are seeing problems that did not exist two years ago.
Here are five signs we see regularly in Cape Town businesses that have hit that point – and what each one actually means.
1. The same problems keep coming back
Your email stops working. You call someone, they fix it. Three weeks later, it stops again. Different error message, same result: half the office cannot send or receive email.
This is the clearest sign that your IT needs have outpaced your IT support. In break-fix mode (where you call someone only when things go wrong), the focus is on getting you back up and running. Nobody is investigating why the problem keeps happening.
What is actually going on: Recurring problems almost always have an underlying cause. A server running low on disk space. A piece of software that has not been updated in months. A network device that is quietly failing. A mailbox that has grown too large for the system to handle reliably.
Managed IT support includes monitoring that catches these root causes. A monitoring agent on your server would have flagged the disk space issue weeks before it caused an outage. Patch management would have kept the software updated. The recurring problem would have been a non-event.
From our support tickets: We have seen machines with 14 corrupt email data files totalling 200GB, servers that had not been restarted in months, and network switches that were intermittently dropping connections for weeks before anyone could pin it down. Every one of these started as a “recurring problem” that break-fix could not permanently solve.
2. Your staff have stopped reporting IT issues
This one is subtle, and it is worse than it sounds.
When IT problems are frequent and the response is slow (or the fix does not last), your staff stops mentioning them. They work around them. They restart their own machines three times a day. They use their personal phones when the office WiFi drops. They save files to their desktop instead of the shared drive because “it’s faster.” They stop complaining about Outlook because last time they reported it, nothing changed.
You might think things are running smoothly because nobody is raising issues. In reality, your team has adapted to a broken environment and just accepted it.
Why this matters more than you think: Those workarounds create real risks.
- Files saved to desktops are not backed up. When that hard drive fails, the data is gone.
- Personal phones on the office WiFi are not managed or secured. If that phone has malware, it is now on your business network.
- Staff working around email problems might be missing client communications without anyone knowing.
- Productivity is leaking away in small increments – 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there – that never show up on an invoice but add up to hours per week.
What to do about it: Ask your team directly. Not “are there any IT problems?” but “what are you working around?” You might be surprised by the answers.
3. You are spending more time on IT than on your business
You did not start your business to troubleshoot printers and reset passwords. But somehow, you have become the unofficial IT person. Staff come to you when the internet drops. You are the one who figures out why the projector will not connect. You spend your Saturday night trying to work out why the server is making a strange noise.
This is common in businesses with 5 to 15 people. Too big for everyone to figure things out on their own, too small (you think) for proper IT support.
The maths: How many hours per month do you spend on IT issues? Be honest – include the time troubleshooting, the time researching solutions, the time on hold with Microsoft, and the time explaining to staff why the WiFi is slow again.
If you bill your own time at any reasonable rate, those hours add up fast. A business owner spending 5 hours a month on IT at an opportunity cost of R500 per hour is effectively spending R2,500 per month on IT support – except they are getting amateur troubleshooting instead of professional monitoring and management.
That R2,500 would buy a meaningful amount of actual IT support. With monitoring, patch management, and someone to call who fixes things properly the first time.
The bigger cost: Every hour you spend on IT is an hour you are not spending on sales, client work, strategy, or anything else that actually grows your business. IT is infrastructure. It should run quietly in the background, not consume your evenings.
4. You have had a scare you cannot explain
A staff member reports a “weird email from the bank.” You find a file on the server you do not recognise. Someone’s Outlook sends messages they did not write. Your antivirus pops up a warning, but you are not sure if it actually stopped anything.
These scares often get dismissed. “It was probably nothing.” “The antivirus caught it.” “We changed the password, so it should be fine.”
Maybe. Or maybe someone accessed your system and you do not have the visibility to know what they did. Without proper security tools, you cannot tell the difference between a false alarm and a genuine breach.
Why it matters under POPIA: If your business handles personal data – client names, ID numbers, financial information, employee records – you have legal obligations under POPIA. A data breach involving personal information must be reported to the Information Regulator. And if the regulator investigates and finds you had no reasonable security measures in place, the consequences include fines and reputational damage.
“We thought the antivirus caught it” is not a documented security measure. Managed endpoint protection, email security, and monitoring are.
What managed security actually looks like: Centrally managed antivirus across all devices. Email filtering that blocks phishing before it reaches your staff. Monitoring that alerts your IT team when something suspicious happens. Audit trails that show what was accessed and when. None of these exist in a break-fix setup.
5. You are growing, and your IT cannot keep up
You hired three new people this quarter. Each one needed a laptop, an email account, access to shared files, and software installed. Setting each person up took most of a day. There was no standard process – you figured it out as you went.
Or maybe you opened a second location and need people to access the same systems from both places. Or staff are working from home some days and the VPN keeps disconnecting. Or you moved to Microsoft 365 but nobody really manages it – licenses are a mess, permissions are guesswork, and nobody is sure who has access to what.
Growth is good. But every person and every device you add makes your IT environment more complex. Without someone managing that complexity, small issues compound. The WiFi that worked fine for 5 people struggles with 12. The shared drive that was fast with 100GB of files crawls at 500GB. The laptop that was set up as a quick fix for the new hire still has no antivirus six months later.
What scaling IT actually requires:
- Standardised onboarding: new starters set up the same way every time, with the right access from day one
- License management: knowing what you are paying for and who is using it
- Network planning: WiFi, switches, and bandwidth that match your actual headcount
- Security that scales: adding endpoint protection automatically when new devices join
- Someone who can see the whole picture and plan ahead instead of reacting to each new problem
This is what managed IT does. It turns IT from a series of one-off fixes into a system that grows with your business.
Recognising the signs is the first step
If you nodded at two or more of these signs, your business has probably reached the point where informal IT support is costing you more than a managed plan would.
That does not mean you need the most expensive option available. It might mean:
- Starting with monitoring and patch management so problems get caught early and your systems stay updated. That alone prevents the majority of recurring issues.
- Adding email security if email problems are a regular source of frustration. Email is the most-used tool and the biggest attack surface.
- Getting a professional assessment of your current setup. Sometimes a 30-minute conversation reveals gaps you did not know existed.
The goal is not to spend more on IT. It is to spend smarter – so that your IT runs quietly and your business grows without being held back by systems that cannot keep up.
Find out where you stand
Our IT Health Check takes a few minutes and gives you a clear picture of where your business IT is strong and where the gaps are. No commitment, no cost, just a starting point.
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