Professional Services — Accounting
Accounting Firm Drops Break-Fix IT and Cuts Unplanned Downtime by 94%
94% less downtime
Unplanned downtime dropped from approximately 18 hours per quarter to under 1 hour.
15-minute response
Average response time for critical issues, down from 6+ hours under the previous break-fix arrangement.
100% patch compliance
All workstations and servers consistently within two weeks of latest security patches.
Tax season — zero incidents
First tax season in three years with no IT-related disruptions to billable work.
The challenge
The firm had relied on a part-time break-fix technician who was also servicing several other businesses in the area. Response times ranged from a few hours to two days, depending on his availability. During tax season, a failed server kept five staff offline for a full business day while the technician sourced a replacement drive. Workstations ran Windows Defender with no central management — two machines had been running with expired virus definitions for over three months without anyone noticing. There was no patch management schedule, no backup verification process, and the partners had no visibility into the state of their own IT environment.
What we did
- Migrated the firm to a Fundy Tech managed IT plan with 24/7 monitoring, proactive alerting, and same-day remote response.
- Deployed managed endpoint detection and response on all 16 devices (14 workstations plus 2 servers), replacing unmanaged Windows Defender.
- Implemented automated patch management with a bi-weekly cycle for OS and application updates, tested on a pilot machine before company-wide rollout.
- Replaced the aging server's backup with a cloud-integrated appliance taking snapshots every 15 minutes, with monthly restore tests.
- Enabled multi-factor authentication across the firm's Microsoft 365 tenant and configured conditional access policies for remote work.
- Provided a dedicated help desk number with guaranteed response times — 15 minutes for critical issues, 2 hours for standard requests.
“During tax season, every hour of downtime costs us real money. Last year we lost a full day to a server problem. This year, nothing. The monthly fee pays for itself in the first avoided incident.”