Setting Up IT for a New Canterbury Office

This is a walkthrough of how CT1 Technologies approaches a new office IT setup, using a recent Canterbury project as the basis. The client was a professional services firm taking on a new space in the city centre, with a team of twelve staff moving in from a mixture of home working and a shared workspace arrangement.

The names are anonymised, but the detail is real.

Where we started: the brief

The client came to us six weeks before their planned move-in date. They had a lease signed, a fit-out contractor booked, and a rough idea that they needed "computers, Wi-Fi, and email sorted." Beyond that, the IT requirements had not been formally documented.

That starting point is more common than you might expect. Most business owners are not IT professionals, and the gap between "we need IT" and "here is exactly what we need" is one of the most useful things an IT provider can help bridge before any purchasing decisions are made.

Our first step was a scoping call covering the basics: how many staff, what software they used day to day, whether they had existing Microsoft 365 licences, how they currently stored files, what security requirements the business had, and what their budget looked like. That conversation took about an hour and gave us enough to produce a detailed proposal.

The infrastructure plan

For a twelve-person professional services office, the infrastructure requirement was relatively straightforward, but getting the foundations right mattered, because everything else sits on top of them.

Internet connectivity Before anything else, we assessed the connectivity options for the building. The space had a standard broadband connection in place, but for a twelve-person team working primarily from cloud-based tools, we recommended a dedicated leased line, a symmetric, uncontended business connection with a guaranteed speed and a service-level agreement on uptime. The additional monthly cost over standard broadband was modest relative to the cost of unreliable connectivity across a full team.

Network hardware A managed switch, a business-grade firewall, and two access points covering the office floor plan. The firewall was configured with content filtering, intrusion detection, and a separate guest Wi-Fi network isolated from the business network. We also put in place remote management so that we could monitor and update the network equipment without needing to visit the office for every change.

Devices The client had a mix of existing laptops and new machines to procure. We supplied and configured the new devices, enrolled all of them into Microsoft Intune for centralised device management, and applied a standard security baseline across the fleet. This covered disk encryption, screen lock policies, and automatic patching.

Telephony The client wanted to move away from a traditional phone system and asked us to look at cloud-based options. We recommended and set up a hosted VoIP solution: individual numbers for each staff member, a main office number with a simple call routing menu, and integration with Microsoft Teams so that calls could be taken on laptop or mobile as well as a desk phone. The whole system was provisioned and tested before move-in day.

Microsoft 365 configuration

The client already held Microsoft 365 Business Standard licences but had never had the tenancy properly configured. Several issues were identified during the audit:

Multi-factor authentication was not enforced across all users. Three accounts, including a director's account, had no MFA at all.

Files had historically been saved to individual OneDrives rather than a shared SharePoint structure. There was no consistent folder organisation and several important documents existed only on individual accounts.

The outbound email domain had SPF configured but was missing DKIM and DMARC records, leaving it vulnerable to impersonation.

We addressed all three areas as part of the setup. MFA was enforced tenant-wide using Conditional Access policies. We created a SharePoint structure aligned to how the business actually worked (a site per team, with a clear and agreed folder hierarchy) and migrated the scattered OneDrive content across. DKIM and DMARC were configured on the domain, with DMARC initially set to monitoring mode so we could verify legitimate email flows before moving to enforcement.

Backup

The client had no backup in place beyond the standard Microsoft 365 retention settings, which, as we explained, are not a backup. We set up a third party Microsoft 365 backup covering Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, with daily backups and a 12-month retention period. We also performed a test restore before signing off the setup to confirm the process worked end to end.

Move-in day

We attended on move-in day to confirm that everything was running correctly with staff actually in the space. In practice, two issues needed attention: one access point needed repositioning to cover a meeting room that turned out to have a thick partition wall, and one member of staff's laptop had not enrolled correctly into Intune due to a stale local account. Both were resolved within the first hour.

By lunchtime on day one, all twelve staff were online, calls were routing correctly, files were accessible, and no one had needed to call us with a problem.

What made it go smoothly

The honest answer is lead time and preparation. Six weeks is actually a relatively short window for a full office setup, but it was enough because the scoping was thorough at the start and there were no surprises later. Businesses that call us two weeks before move-in tend to have a more stressful experience, not because the work cannot be done, but because the decisions that should have been made earlier end up being made under pressure.

If you are planning a new office in Canterbury or anywhere across Kent and want the IT to be the least stressful part of the project, the best time to talk to us is as early as possible.

Planning a new office setup?

CT1 Technologies handles new office IT setups across Canterbury and Kent from initial scoping through to move-in day support. Get in touch and tell us what you are planning: the earlier in the process we talk, the smoother it tends to go.

CT1 Technologies provides managed IT support, cybersecurity, and cloud services to businesses across Canterbury and Kent.