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Fifteen questions that decide how bad your worst day gets

Not an audit — a few minutes against the practices that separate an ordinary bad day from an expensive week. Score yourself honestly. No email address, no sign-up.

The questions

Answer honestly — nobody is watching

Each answer is weighted by what it costs to get wrong, so an untested backup counts for more than a missing hardware list. "Not sure" counts as a gap, because on the day it matters it behaves like one.

Knowing before your customers do

Do you hear about outages from monitoring rather than from staff or customers?

Are you alerted automatically when a backup fails, a disk fills, or a certificate is about to expire?

Is there a written, agreed list of which systems are business-critical?

Backups you have actually tested

Have you restored from a backup, on purpose, in the last six months?

Is at least one backup copy offline or immutable, where ransomware cannot reach it?

Do you know how long a full restore takes, and can the business survive that long?

Keeping current

Are operating system and application updates applied on a schedule rather than when someone remembers?

Do you know which of your devices and software are past end-of-support?

Who can get in

Is multi-factor authentication enforced on email and remote access, for everyone, with no exceptions?

Does every person have their own account, with no shared logins?

Are administrator rights limited to those who need them, and separate from day-to-day accounts?

Whether it survives you

Could someone else run your IT for two weeks from what is written down?

Is there a current inventory of hardware, software and who has what?

Joiners and leavers

When someone leaves, does a checklist revoke every account the same day?

Do you know every software subscription in use, including ones bought on a department card?

0%

Answered
Gaps
Not sure

answered "not sure", and those count as gaps. Not knowing whether a backup restores carries the same risk on the day it matters as it not restoring — so the score stays honest rather than kind.

Get the fixes, not just the score

Your gaps in order of what they cost to get wrong, each with what to do about it and what it costs to leave. Most are an afternoon rather than a project. Emailed as a private link.

The score above stays free. This is the only thing that asks.

Answer them all for a report that reflects your whole operation.

Estimates, not advice

Fifteen questions answered in a few minutes is not an audit. This cannot see your network, your contracts or your actual configuration, and a practice you believe is in place may not be working. Verify anything here before acting on it. Provided as is, with no responsibility accepted for its use or misuse.

If the list is longer than you would like

Most of this is somebody's job, and it does not have to be yours

Managed IT is largely this: closing these gaps, keeping them closed, and monitoring that catches the next one before you do. Twenty minutes and you will get a straight answer about whether it is worth it.