The same questions, asked on every first call.

The IT Reality Check is EmpowerIT's name for our free 12-page IT readiness diagnostic. It is the same artifact that other firms call an IT gap analysis, cyber insurance readiness assessment, or audit-prep checklist, but scored specifically against three pressures at once: what your cyber insurance carrier will demand at renewal, what your customer auditors will ask at next audit, and what your AI roadmap needs underneath.

Five business days. Twelve pages. Includes a 30-minute walkthrough with Lee Darke. No commitment. Most clients use it to surface the gaps they didn't know existed, before a carrier, an auditor, or a breach forces them into the open.

Carriers now ask about EDR coverage, log retention, incident response time, backup immutability, and MFA enforcement on every renewal. The questions are getting harder each cycle.

EmpowerIT runs a free IT Reality Check, a 12-page IT gap analysis that maps your current posture against what your specific carrier's renewal questionnaire will demand. Most renewals close cleanly when the carrier sees a 24/7 SOC, tested immutable backups, and a written incident response runbook in place.

A customer audit with a 90-day deadline is recoverable if the foundation work starts on day one.

The IT Reality Check identifies the highest-risk gaps first: identity (MFA, conditional access), endpoint (EDR coverage), data (immutable backups + tested recovery), network (segmentation, monitoring), and documentation. Then we remediate in dependency order.

Our two documented recoveries (see Case Studies) were a 72-hour recovery and a 48-hour recovery. Both preserved business continuity through quarter-end deliverables.

Recovery time depends almost entirely on whether your backups were immutable, tested against the recovery plan rather than against themselves, and whether a SOC was monitoring at the time of detection. Not which MSP runs the recovery.

AI readiness is a foundation question more than an AI question. Before AI workloads can run safely, the underlying infrastructure needs the same posture your insurance carrier and customer auditor already want: identity hygiene, data segmentation, network monitoring, evidence collection.

EmpowerIT's AI Readiness assessment evaluates your specific use cases, not a generic checklist, and produces a prioritized roadmap. Lee Darke leads the scoping personally.

EmpowerIT serves Ontario SMBs in the $2M to $200M revenue band. Engagements are scoped per environment after the free IT Reality Check identifies the actual gap surface.

Most clients move from audit to remediated foundation within 60 to 90 days, then continue on a managed-services baseline that includes 24/7 SOC, helpdesk under 15 minutes average response, and quarterly business reviews focused on outcomes rather than tickets.

Regular IT support reacts to tickets. A SOC is proactive threat hunting in front of the alerts.

EmpowerIT runs 24/7 detection on NinjaRMM for monitoring, Field Effect for threat detection and response, and Microsoft 365 Defender for identity and endpoint coverage. The same posture runs against clean environments and recovered environments. That's the operational practice behind the zero ticket days to date.

Foundation is the IT layer Ontario SMBs run on: managed infrastructure, 24/7 cybersecurity operations, and helpdesk to the standard your insurance carrier and customer auditor demand.

Next Mile is what the foundation makes possible: AI Readiness assessment, custom AI build, evidence-by-design compliance. Same operational stance. One layer makes the other safe.

Monitoring runs around the clock. We see the issue before you do.

Our SOC is Canadian and human-staffed. If a cyber event happens, they see and take action.

Human response is staffed during business hours (Mon to Fri, 8 to 6 ET) with on-call escalation for outages that take your business offline. Sunday-night printer trouble waits until Monday; a ransomware indicator at 2 AM does not.

Both, with a bias toward remote. We deploy laptops, configure firewalls, and run network installs in southwestern Ontario when the situation calls for it.

Everywhere else, we coordinate with a vetted local partner so the work still gets done.

Yes. Our compliance readiness reviews map your environment against PIPEDA federally and PHIPA for Ontario healthcare clients, plus the CIS Controls and Cyber Secure Canada baselines that auditors and insurers actually ask about.

We produce the evidence; you keep it.

Three structures, depending on engagement: monthly per-user managed services for ongoing operations, fixed-fee for defined projects (migrations, automations, compliance work), and block-hour for tactical support.

We quote after the consultation. Pricing without scope is guesswork, and we don't guess.