Most small businesses do not have an IT department. They have an owner who handles it, an office manager who inherited it, or the one employee who is good with computers and has quietly become responsible for the server. It works until it doesn’t.
North Star provides managed IT support and cybersecurity for small and midsize businesses across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. Most of our clients run between 5 and 300 computers, have no full-time IT staff, and have no regulator looking over their shoulder — they simply depend on their technology working, and would rather have it handled properly than hope for the best.
The phrase gets used loosely, so here is what it means with us. For a predictable monthly fee, one team takes responsibility for the technology your business runs on:
Before a business calls us, technology is generally being handled one of three ways. Each works for a while.
Someone capable absorbs the work alongside their real job. It costs nothing visible, which is the appeal. What it actually costs is that person’s time, the gaps in what one self-taught generalist can know about security and backup, and a single point of failure who eventually takes another job and leaves with every password in their head.
You call someone when things break and pay for the visit. Cheapest on paper, most expensive in downtime — and the incentives point the wrong way, because a provider paid by the hour to fix problems earns nothing from preventing them. Nothing gets monitored between calls, so problems are found by your staff rather than by anyone watching.
Often excellent, genuinely responsive, and one person. When they are on holiday, ill, or busy with a larger client, you wait. There is no after-hours coverage, no second opinion, and no continuity if they retire or move on.
The common thread is that all three work until the day something goes properly wrong. A managed service exists to change what happens on that day — and to make it less likely in the first place.
This is the most common thing we hear, and it misunderstands how attacks now work. Nobody chose your business. Automated tools scan every address on the internet continuously, looking for an unpatched system, an exposed remote-access port, or a password that has appeared in a previous breach. The attack finds you because you were reachable, not because you were interesting.
Small businesses are in some ways the better target: the security is usually thinner, the payment is more likely to come quickly, and there is rarely an internal team to notice anything before it is finished. A wire redirected during a purchase, a week of files encrypted, a mailbox quietly forwarding to someone else — none of these require a business to be large, regulated or notable.
The controls that stop this are not exotic. Multi-factor authentication, patched systems, backup that has been restored from at least once, staff who can recognise a fake login page, and someone watching outside business hours. Our guide on how to spot phishing in email, Teams and fake IT support messages is free to share with your team, and covers the human half of it.
We start by measuring rather than proposing. Every engagement opens with a network health and security assessment: an inventory of what is actually connected, a check of whether the protections you believe are in place are working, and a ranked list of what needs attention — with a budget and a sequence. You get that whether or not you hire us.
From there, most clients move to full managed IT services with managed security included. If you already have someone internal, co-managed IT supports them rather than replacing them — covering nights, holidays, security operations and the projects nobody has time for.
We are also the people who will tell you not to buy something. Hardware and software are sourced competitively through vendor-neutral IT procurement, and if what you already own is good enough, we will say so.
Managed services are a predictable recurring fee based on the number of people and computers you have and the systems in play. We do not publish price lists, because environments differ enough that any public figure would either mislead you or be padded to cover the worst case. Every quote follows an assessment, so you know what you are buying before you see a number.
What we can tell you is that the comparison is rarely against zero. It is against the hourly invoices, the staff time absorbed by whoever currently handles it, and the cost of the week your business cannot operate.
From our office in Northglenn we support small businesses across Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Northglenn, Broomfield, Commerce City, Brighton, Centennial, Greenwood Village, Englewood, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Parker, Castle Rock, Golden, Wheat Ridge, Colorado Springs, Monument, Fountain, Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor and Greeley, along with the surrounding communities and clients running remote and hybrid teams.
Some fields carry specific obligations on top of the fundamentals. If yours does, see the industries we serve — but most of our clients are simply businesses that need their technology to work.
Around five computers is where a managed program starts to make sense. Below that, the structure usually costs more than it returns, and we will tell you so rather than sell you something. Our range runs to roughly 300 endpoints; above that, an internal IT department typically makes sense with us in a co-managed or security-only role.
No. Co-managed arrangements are common and often work better. The internal person usually keeps user-facing support and knowledge of your business applications, while we cover monitoring, security operations, after-hours coverage, specialist projects and vacation gaps.
It is a start, and it is usually less complete than people expect. The common findings in our assessments are backups that have never been restored from, antivirus missing on some machines, multi-factor authentication switched on for some staff but not all, and former employees whose accounts still work. None of these are exotic failures; they are what happens when nobody owns the checking.
Phone or email during business hours, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Mountain, Monday through Friday, with an emergency after-hours number for managed clients covering evenings and weekends. Our agreements commit to a technician callback within two hours of a request reaching dispatch. Most issues are resolved remotely; when something needs a person in the room, our technicians work across the Front Range.
The honest way to evaluate any IT provider is to have them measure your environment and show you what they find. We will inventory what is running, test whether your protections work, and give you a ranked, budgeted roadmap — whether or not you engage us afterward. Call 303-552-0018 or book a time below.
