Althora

IT Support in Boston

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Small offices rarely need a full IT department. They need someone who answers, who already knows how their systems are put together, and who fixes the cause rather than the symptom.

That is what this is. Help desk, maintenance, monitoring and security for businesses across Greater Boston that are too small to employ IT staff and too dependent on their systems to leave them alone.

What is included

Help desk. Your team texts or emails and gets a person. No portal to learn first, no ticket number instead of an answer. Most issues are resolved in a remote session that starts within minutes.

Pricing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most IT companies in this market will not publish a price. You fill in a form, you take a call, and a number arrives a week later.

We would rather you could estimate this yourself before talking to anyone. Below is what things actually cost, and — more useful — what makes them cost more or less.

Hourly support

$150 per hour, billed in 15-minute increments after the first hour.

Remote IT Support

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most IT problems do not need hands in the room. They need someone competent looking at the screen within the hour — not a same-day window, not a ticket in a queue, and not a promise to call back.

Remote support is where we start, for one practical reason: it is the difference between a problem that costs you twenty minutes and one that costs you a day.

What gets solved remotely

Software that will not launch, update or activate
Email: Outlook, Microsoft 365, shared mailboxes, signatures, calendar permissions
Printers, drivers and scan-to-email — see printer support
Wi-Fi and router configuration, channel planning, firmware
New user setup, offboarding, permissions and file access
Backup verification and restoring a file someone deleted
Malware cleanup and post-incident checks
VPN and remote access for staff working from home
Anything where the answer is “why is this doing that?”

That covers the large majority of what a small office actually calls about.

Wi-Fi Support in Boston

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wi-Fi is the most complained-about and least diagnosed part of a small office network. Video calls break up in one corner, the back office loses the printer every afternoon, and someone eventually suggests calling the internet provider — who runs a speed test at the wall, finds nothing wrong, and closes the ticket.

We start somewhere else: measuring what the wireless is actually doing where people sit.

What we find, in rough order of frequency

Access points in the wrong place. The single most common cause. Wi-Fi radiates in a sphere and gets absorbed by everything solid — brick, concrete, filing cabinets, elevator shafts, and the mirrors and pipework in bathrooms. An access point mounted for convenience near the server closet rather than for coverage will leave a dead zone thirty feet away.

Printer Support in Boston

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are two completely different businesses hiding behind the phrase “printer problem”, and calling the wrong one wastes a week.

If the machine grinds, jams, streaks or shows a hardware error code, you need a repair technician with parts. Greater Boston has specialists who have done that for forty years, and we will tell you to call them.

We handle the other one — far more common in offices, and the one nobody advertises: the printer works perfectly, and no one can reach it.

Network Support in Boston

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The network is the part of your office nobody thinks about until everything stops at once. It is also where the cheapest decisions cause the longest problems.

We design, fix and maintain the wired infrastructure for small and mid-sized offices across Greater Boston — and we build it so it survives us leaving.

What we handle

Switching. Properly specified switches with the port count you actually need, managed where management earns its cost. Enough PoE budget for the access points and cameras, with room to grow.

Cybersecurity for Boston Businesses

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Security for a ten-person office is not a smaller version of enterprise security. It is a short list of controls that stop nearly everything, done properly and kept working.

We are not going to sell you a platform. We are going to make sure the basics are actually in place, because in every incident we have been called into, the failure was a basic control that was missing or had quietly stopped working.

Industries We Know Well

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most IT problems are the same everywhere. A few are not — and the ones that are not tend to be the expensive ones, because they come with obligations that land on you rather than on your IT provider.

These are the sectors where we know the specific rules, the specific software and the specific times of year when nothing may be allowed to break.

Accounting and tax firms

The FTC Safeguards Rule treats tax preparers as financial institutions. IRS Publication 4557 sets out what safeguarding taxpayer data should look like, and PTIN renewal asks you to confirm you have a written security plan.

IT Support for Accounting Firms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Accounting and tax practices carry an obligation that most small businesses do not: you hold Social Security numbers, bank details and full financial pictures for hundreds of people, and there is specific federal guidance about how you are expected to protect it.

Most IT providers do not know that guidance exists. The penalties, and the client relationships, land on you.

What actually applies to you

IRS Publication 4557, Safeguarding Taxpayer Data. The IRS guidance for tax professionals — the reference point for what a reasonable security program looks like in your profession.

IT Support for Professional Offices

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Law firms, architecture studios, consultancies, design practices and small medical offices share a set of problems that generic IT support tends to miss: the work product is confidential, the files are often enormous, the deadlines are immovable, and the person who has to explain a system failure to a client is you.

What tends to be true in these offices

Confidentiality is professional, not just contractual. For attorneys, the duty of confidentiality and the duty of technology competence under the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct extend to how client information is stored and who can reach it. Choosing a provider that treats your systems casually is itself a professional risk.

IT Support in Cambridge, MA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cambridge businesses tend to fall into two groups, and they need almost opposite things.

Startups and research spinouts, mostly around Kendall Square, growing fast enough that infrastructure is always a step behind. Cloud-first, laptop-heavy, and suddenly facing a security questionnaire from an investor or a partner that asks questions nobody has documented answers to.

Established small businesses — practices, studios, shops and offices in Central, Harvard, Porter and Inman — with a fixed office, a server or NAS, and a network that grew by accretion over a decade.

IT Support in Newton, MA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Newton is dense with professional practices — dental and medical offices, law firms, accountants, therapists and consultancies, mostly in converted houses and small commercial buildings across Newton Centre, Newton Corner, the Highlands and Nonantum.

That shapes the work in a specific way: these offices run one or two pieces of software that the entire business depends on, hold sensitive client or patient records, and have nobody on staff whose job is technology.

IT Support in Somerville, MA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Somerville businesses skew small, independent and space-constrained — restaurants and cafés around Davis and Union, studios and workshops in converted industrial buildings, small professional offices, and the newer commercial tenants around Assembly Row.

The technology problems follow from that: mixed-use buildings, tight budgets, payment systems that cannot go down, and a lot of guest Wi-Fi.

What we see in Somerville specifically

Guest Wi-Fi sharing the network with the till. The single most common finding, and the most serious. Customers on the same network as the point of sale is exactly what segmentation exists to prevent. See network support.

IT Support in Brookline, MA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Brookline is unusually dense with small healthcare and professional practices — dental offices, therapy and counselling practices, specialist physicians, law firms and accountants, concentrated around Coolidge Corner, Brookline Village and Washington Square, with a lot of Longwood-adjacent medical activity.

Nearly all of them are in converted residential buildings, hold regulated data, and have no technical staff.

What we see in Brookline specifically

Patient data in offices designed as apartments. The building was never planned for a network or for a room that locks. Where the server or NAS physically sits, and who can walk past it, is a real access-control question that most practices have never considered.

Home & Personal Tech Support

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not everything is a business problem. Sometimes the Wi-Fi does not reach the back bedroom, the laptop has become unbearably slow, the printer refuses to talk to the new phone, or a parent needs someone patient to explain the same thing twice without sighing.

We do that too, across Greater Boston.

What we help with

Computers that have become slow, and whether it is worth fixing or replacing
Wi-Fi that does not reach the whole house — usually placement, not a new router
New computer, phone or tablet setup, and moving everything across from the old one
Printers and scanners, including the ones that worked until an update
Backup, so family photos survive a dead drive
Malware, pop-ups, browser hijacks and cleaning up after a scam call
Smart home devices that will not connect
Streaming, TVs and the tangle of remotes behind them
Email problems, recovering accounts, sorting out passwords
Patient one-to-one help for someone who finds all of this stressful

How we work

Text or email a description of the problem. We will tell you whether it can be solved remotely — many things can, and that is faster and cheaper — or whether it needs a visit.

AI & Custom Software Development

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most businesses do not need an AI strategy. They need one specific, repetitive, expensive task to stop consuming a person’s week.

That is the work we take on: practical systems that solve a defined problem and keep running afterwards, without a consulting engagement to discover what the problem is.

What this looks like in practice

Document and data extraction. Invoices, forms, contracts, reports — pulling structured data out of unstructured documents so nobody retypes them. This is the highest-return category for most small businesses, and the easiest to measure.

Contact Althora

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The fastest way to reach us is a text message. Describe what stopped working in a sentence — we will tell you whether it is something we can solve remotely in the next ten minutes, or whether it needs someone on site.

Text or call: (617) 991-4427 Email: contact@althora.com

We answer both. If you would rather write it out than explain it on the phone, email is genuinely fine — most problems are easier to describe in writing anyway.