The Small Business IT Checklist for Burbank Businesses

Most small businesses in Burbank, Glendale and the Valley sit in an awkward gap: too small for a managed service provider's monthly contract, too dependent on their systems to have no plan at all. This checklist is for those businesses — a dental office, a five-person post house, a restaurant, a shop, a design studio.

None of what follows is exotic. These are the five failures I actually see take small businesses down, and what each costs to prevent.

1. Backups that have never been tested

The failure: Someone set up a backup years ago. It's been "running" ever since. Then a drive fails, or ransomware hits, and it turns out the backup stopped three years ago, or it's backing up a folder nobody uses anymore, or it's on a drive sitting next to the server that got encrypted too.

The rule: 3-2-1. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with one off-site. For a small business that usually means: the live data, a local NAS or external drive, and a cloud backup.

The part everyone skips: test a restore. Not "check that it says it ran." Actually restore a file and open it. Quarterly. A backup you haven't restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup.

Cost: $400–$1,200 to set up properly for a small office, plus $10–$60/month for cloud. Against the cost of losing your client files, this is nothing.

2. Everything on one flat network

The failure: The POS terminal, the guest Wi-Fi, the staff laptops, the security cameras and the smart thermostat are all on the same network. A customer's compromised phone on your guest Wi-Fi can see your card terminal. A cheap IP camera with a default password becomes an entry point to everything.

The fix: VLAN separation. Staff on one network, guests on another with no access to anything internal, POS on its own isolated segment, cameras and IoT on a third. For card processing this isn't just good practice — network segmentation is a baseline PCI expectation.

Cost: $600–$1,500 depending on whether your existing hardware supports it. This is the highest-value security spend most small businesses can make.

3. Nobody offboards

The failure: An employee leaves. Their email gets forwarded. Six months later nobody remembers they still have access to the shared drive, the POS admin, the social accounts, the domain registrar and the Wi-Fi password. Sometimes for years.

The fix: A written offboarding checklist and, critically, a written list of every system with accounts in it. Most small businesses cannot produce that list, which is the actual problem — you can't revoke access to systems you've forgotten exist.

• Email and calendar — disable, don't delete, then forward
• File storage and shared drives
• POS, booking, or industry software
• Password manager access revoked
• MFA devices removed
• Wi-Fi password changed if it was shared
• Physical: keys, alarm codes, camera system access
• Financial: banking, payroll, card processor
• Domain registrar and website admin — the one that bites hardest

Cost: a couple of hours to document. Free thereafter.

4. No multi-factor authentication

The failure: Business email compromise. Someone phishes a password, gets into the owner's email, watches for a few weeks, then emails your bookkeeper with new wire instructions on a real invoice. This is the most common way small businesses lose real money, and it doesn't require any technical sophistication.

The fix: MFA on email, banking, payroll, the domain registrar and the password manager. App-based (Authenticator, Duo) or hardware keys — not SMS, which is vulnerable to SIM swapping.

Plus one non-technical control that stops the entire attack: any change to payment details gets verified by phone, on a number you already had, not one from the email. Write it down as a policy.

Cost: mostly free. A few hours to roll out.

5. One person knows everything

The failure: The office manager who set everything up leaves. Nobody knows the Wi-Fi admin password, which cable goes where, who the ISP account is under, or how the camera system works. Now every small change is an investigation.

The fix: documentation. It's boring and it's the highest-return thing on this list.

• Network map: what's plugged into what, and where the equipment lives
• Every cable labeled at both ends
• Credential inventory in a shared password manager (not a spreadsheet, not a notebook)
• Account ownership: which email address owns the domain, the ISP account, the Microsoft/Google tenant
• Vendor list with account numbers and support contacts
• A one-page "if X breaks, do Y" sheet for the three most likely failures

Cost: $300–$800 to have done properly for a small office. Pays for itself the first time someone leaves.

The quarterly fifteen-minute check

1. Restore one file from backup and open it
2. Review who has access to email, files and financial systems
3. Confirm the camera system is actually recording and check retention
4. Check for pending updates on the router, firewall and access points
5. Verify the guest Wi-Fi still can't reach anything internal (try it from a phone)

Burbank-specific notes

Media District and post-production businesses: your risk profile is different. Client media is the asset, file sizes are enormous, and a slow network genuinely costs billable hours. Prioritize fast local storage with a proper RAID, a real off-site copy, and 10GbE where it earns its keep. Also: client security requirements are increasingly a condition of getting work.

Retail and restaurants on Magnolia, San Fernando and Brand: POS separation is the priority, followed by camera coverage of the register and entries with a documented footage-export procedure. Being able to hand police or your insurer a clean clip within an hour is worth having practiced once.

Professional offices: if you handle health or financial data, your obligations are higher than this checklist. Encryption at rest, access logging and a written incident response plan are the additional baseline.

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