Frequently Asked
Questions

We act as an outside technology department for businesses — we figure out what they need, source it through our pre-negotiated vendor contracts so they pay less than they could on their own, and our engineers handle the heavy lifting.

Most clients save around 25% on their tech spend and never have to talk to a vendor again. We're not an MSP, not a reseller, and not a staffing firm. The closest analogy is an insurance broker — you get better pricing, expert guidance, and we're paid by the vendor when you sign, not by you.

We work with businesses of all sizes — from 10-person companies where the CEO is also the de facto IT department, to enterprise organizations with full IT teams managing hundreds of locations. Our model scales to both.

For small businesses, we function as an outsourced technology advisor. For mid-market and enterprise clients, we sit alongside the internal IT team and handle vendor procurement and sourcing so engineers can stay focused on running the environment. We currently service 1,000+ locations worldwide.

We cover your full technology stack — connectivity, cloud, security, communications, and more. Specifically: internet connectivity, phone systems (VoIP), Microsoft 365 & Google Workspace, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), cybersecurity, AI integrations, SAP & enterprise software, printers & copiers, cellular & Starlink worldwide, SD-WAN & networking, unified communications, AI cameras, and IoT devices.

The short version: if there's a vendor billing your business for technology, we can probably source it better and manage it on your behalf. We have contracts with over 200+ technology vendors.

No — and that's an important distinction. We work alongside your internal IT team or MSP. Your IT team runs the environment. We handle vendor procurement, sourcing, benchmarking, and escalation so your team can stay focused on running the environment rather than managing 30 vendor relationships.

If anything, we make your IT team more effective. They get better-priced solutions, a single escalation point for vendor issues, and access to our engineering resources for evaluations and implementations — all without adding headcount.

A technology strategy consultant helps connect your technology decisions to your business outcomes — instead of reacting to whatever a vendor is pitching. In practice: benchmarking your current spend against the market, identifying gaps before they become emergencies, building a renewal roadmap, and making sure you're not paying for tools you're not using.

At SNC, we add a layer that most consultants don't: we execute on the strategy through our vendor network, rather than just delivering a report and leaving. We source the solution, manage the relationship, and stay accountable to the outcome.

Our model works exactly like a mortgage broker or insurance broker. When you go through a broker, they have pre-negotiated rates across dozens of providers — you pay less than retail, and the provider pays the broker a referral fee when you sign. You never see a bill from us. Ever.

We've negotiated rates across 200+ technology vendors. The vendor pays us a residual fee when you sign. Our incentive is to find the right fit — because if it's a bad fit, you leave, and we lose that income. So we're highly motivated to only recommend what actually works for you.

The short answer: no. Because we have contracts with 200+ vendors, we have zero financial reason to push one provider over another. A biased recommendation means a bad fit, which means the client leaves, which means we lose the revenue.

Compare that to a vendor rep who has a quota for a single product and zero skin in the game once the contract is signed. We stay in the relationship long-term, which means we stay accountable.

Being in active contracts is actually the ideal time to get involved. We'll map everything you have, flag what's coming up for renewal, and position you to get the best deal before auto-renewal locks you in at retail rates again.

Most businesses don't realize their vendor contracts auto-renew with no renegotiation trigger. We track your renewal calendar and make sure you're at the table with leverage before that window closes.

Your IT person's most valuable time is spent running your environment — keeping systems stable, solving real problems, supporting your team. Vendor procurement and contract negotiation are not the best use of that time — and most IT professionals don't have pre-negotiated rates across hundreds of vendors anyway.

We handle the procurement and vendor management layer so your IT person can focus on higher-value work. In most cases, SNC makes internal IT teams more effective, not redundant.

Our technology audit pulls together everything you're spending on technology — every vendor, every invoice, every renewal date — and benchmarks it against the market using our contracted rates across 200+ providers.

We look at internet & connectivity, phone systems, cloud licenses (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace), security tools, copiers, cellular, and any other recurring technology spend. Most businesses find 20–30% that's either being overpaid or going toward underutilized licenses. If you're already getting a great deal, we'll tell you that too.

A free cloud migration assessment evaluates your current infrastructure and plans a secure, scalable move to cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure. We identify risks, recommend improvements, and build a custom migration strategy — with no cost or downtime required to get started.

Cloud migration is one of those areas where doing it wrong is significantly more expensive than doing it right. We map your environment, identify dependencies, recommend the right architecture, and source the platform at contracted rates.

A vendor doing a "review" is a sales call. Their goal is to upsell you or lock you into a longer contract at their rates. They have one solution set and one set of incentives.

Our audit is vendor-neutral. We compare your current spend against 200+ providers — including your existing vendors. If your current provider is already giving you the best deal, we'll tell you that. If they're not, you'll see the gap in real numbers.

No obligation — at all. We present what we found versus where you are today. If there's a meaningful gap, we'll show you what it would look like to close it. If there's nothing to improve, we tell you that and you walk away knowing your rates are solid.

The audit is a genuine assessment. Our business model only works if we're delivering real value — so there's no incentive to fabricate savings that aren't there.

Significantly higher than most business owners believe. Attackers increasingly target small and mid-size businesses precisely because they have real data and real money — but without enterprise security infrastructure. Ransomware-as-a-service has industrialized attacks to the point where a 20-person business faces the same threat landscape as one with 2,000.

The average cost of a data breach for a small business now runs into six figures when you account for downtime, recovery, legal exposure, and reputational damage. Most businesses that experience a serious breach never fully recover.

Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts your business's files and systems, then demands payment to restore access. It can shut down operations completely within hours of infection and is one of the most common and damaging threats businesses face right now.

The most common entry points are phishing emails, unpatched software vulnerabilities, and exposed remote access tools. Many businesses discover they were breached weeks or months before the ransomware detonated — attackers move slowly to maximize damage and exfiltrate data first.

Antivirus is a starting point, not a security posture. Traditional antivirus catches known threats — it's largely ineffective against modern attacks that use novel techniques or zero-day vulnerabilities.

A meaningful security posture includes: endpoint detection and response (EDR), multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity and access controls, email security, and a tested backup and recovery plan so ransomware isn't a business-ending event.

Identity and access management (IAM) is about controlling who has access to what — across your software tools, cloud systems, and vendor accounts. It's one of the most exploited attack surfaces because businesses rarely audit it. Former employees, overprivileged accounts, and third-party vendor access that was never revoked are all live vulnerabilities.

With the rise of SaaS tools, most businesses have user accounts sprawled across dozens of platforms — and no one has reviewed access levels since the employee onboarded two years ago.

Cybersecurity consulting helps protect your business by assessing your current security posture, identifying vulnerabilities, and implementing the right security measures. We've protected 10,000+ endpoints across our client base — covering endpoint protection, email security, identity management, and compliance tools sourced through our vendor network at contracted rates.

We're not an MSSP. We identify the right security vendors for your environment and manage those relationships on your behalf.

The most common AI mistake businesses make is buying a solution before understanding the problem. Every major vendor — Microsoft, Google, Salesforce — is attaching AI features to existing products and charging for them. In many cases, businesses are already paying for AI capabilities inside tools they own and aren't using.

Start by auditing what you're already paying for. Then identify one specific, high-friction workflow and evaluate whether an AI integration actually solves it.

AI and machine learning can be applied in customer service (automating responses and routing), operations (identifying workflow bottlenecks), security (behavioral threat detection), and decision-making (predictive analytics on existing data). The key is matching the tool to the actual pain point rather than adopting AI because it's expected.

We help clients identify where AI can deliver measurable ROI — whether that's reducing manual processing time, improving customer responsiveness, or surfacing insights from data that currently sits unused in your systems.

Software license waste is one of the most consistent findings in our audits. Both Microsoft and Google have tiered licensing structures with significant price differences between tiers, and most businesses are over-licensed — paying for advanced compliance features, phone systems, or security tools that are either redundant or simply not in use.

Both platforms have also rolled out AI add-on tiers (Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini) that are often bundled into renewals without a clear cost-benefit conversation. We benchmark your license structure against actual usage and make sure your renewal locks in the right tier at the best available rate.

Single-provider cloud dependency is a real operational risk — one a lot of businesses learned firsthand when major AWS, Azure, and Google outages took down significant portions of the internet for hours. If your entire operation runs through one cloud and that cloud goes down, your business goes down.

There are also cost and contractual risks: cloud providers raise prices, change service terms, and can lock you into proprietary architectures that make switching expensive. We help clients assess their cloud architecture and exposure before it becomes a problem.

Modern phone systems for business — cloud-based VoIP and UCaaS platforms — combine voice, video, messaging, and collaboration into one platform, eliminate expensive on-premise hardware, and typically cost significantly less per seat than maintaining a traditional PBX.

There are dozens of providers in this space — RingCentral, Zoom Phone, Microsoft Teams Phone, 8x8, and many more. We source VoIP and UCaaS through our vendor network, which means objective guidance plus contracted pricing you couldn't get going direct.

Yes — Starlink Business has matured significantly and is a legitimate solution for specific use cases: remote or rural locations where traditional broadband is limited, backup connectivity at any location where uptime is critical, mobile operations like construction sites or field offices, and international deployments where local ISP options are poor.

It's not a replacement for fiber at a primary urban office. But as a failover or primary connection at a hard-to-reach location, it's often the best option available. We manage Starlink deployments worldwide.

SD-WAN lets you intelligently route traffic across multiple internet connections — prioritizing critical applications, reducing latency, and maintaining uptime if one connection fails. For businesses with multiple locations, distributed teams, or heavy cloud application usage, it often delivers significant reliability and performance improvements.

Whether you need it depends on your environment. A single-location business with reliable fiber probably doesn't. A company with 10+ locations managing remote workers, VoIP, and cloud applications probably does. We assess your connectivity needs honestly.

This is one of the most common and most under-addressed risks for small and mid-size businesses. When the person who "handles all the tech stuff" leaves, they often take with them: vendor login credentials, renewal calendars, contract details, and institutional knowledge of how everything is configured.

Businesses that work with SNC have a documented vendor landscape, centralized contract management, and an external team that carries the institutional knowledge. That continuity doesn't disappear with one person's resignation.

Vendor management is everything that happens after you sign a contract with a technology provider — and most businesses are doing it badly, not because they're incompetent, but because it's a full-time job they're doing part-time.

In practice: tracking every renewal date, benchmarking pricing against the current market regularly, owning escalation when a vendor underperforms, reviewing invoices for billing errors and unused services, and maintaining documentation of every contract term. We manage all of this for our clients across 200+ vendor relationships.

Auto-renewals are one of the most reliable ways technology vendors extract money from businesses without adding value. A contract renews at the same rate — or a higher rate — with no renegotiation trigger, and you're locked in for another 12–36 months before you've had a chance to benchmark the market.

Most contracts have a notice window — typically 30 to 90 days before renewal — where you can negotiate or exit. Miss that window and you've lost your leverage entirely. We track every renewal date in your vendor landscape and alert you in advance.

Shadow IT refers to software tools and services that employees adopt without IT's knowledge — personal Dropbox accounts, unauthorized AI writing tools processing confidential data, free versions of project tools. It's surged dramatically with the explosion of SaaS and remote work.

The problem is both security and cost. Unsanctioned tools processing company data may not meet compliance requirements. A technology audit surfaces shadow IT as part of what we review, and we help you establish lightweight governance that doesn't create friction for your team.

This is one of the areas where we add the most value. Multi-location businesses end up with fragmented vendor relationships — different internet providers at each location, different phone systems, inconsistent security tooling — because each location made decisions independently over time.

We've serviced 1,000+ locations and specialize in consolidating the technology stack across multi-location organizations. We negotiate enterprise-level agreements across your entire footprint — giving you leverage a single-location business could never achieve on its own — and manage all vendor relationships centrally. One point of contact. One renewal calendar. One benchmark.