Your IT company is reactive. Ours isn't.

The most common thing we hear from new clients is: "We knew something wasn't right, but we were worried about the disruption." Concern about switching is completely understandable, but in practice a well-managed transition causes zero disruption to your team.

Our process follows a four-stage handover: first, we spend two weeks in read-only observation mode, documenting your environment, user base, licensing, and any active support issues without touching anything. Second, we build your new configuration and monitoring stack in parallel. Third, we run both in tandem for a validation period. Fourth, we complete the formal handover only when you confirm everything is working as expected.

We handle the communication with your outgoing provider. We retrieve all documentation, credentials, and configuration records on your behalf. We've completed this process for every client we've ever taken on. The transition is invisible to your staff, and the planning work begins the moment you engage us.

Access to your environment follows the principle of least privilege throughout. We request only the permissions required for the specific task being performed, using delegated admin roles or time-limited credentials. We never request or retain permanent Global Administrator rights. All administrative access is documented and can be revoked by you at any time.

Every action performed in your Microsoft 365 environment is captured in the Unified Audit Log, which is enabled and retained from day one of our engagement. You have full visibility of this log at all times, and we produce a monthly access and activity summary as part of our standard reporting.

Before any work begins, we sign a Data Processing Agreement that defines the legal basis for processing under GDPR, your rights as data controller, our obligations as data processor, and our breach notification procedures. We are registered with the Data Protection Commission, carry Professional Indemnity insurance, and comply with all applicable Irish and EU data protection legislation.

The IT Health Check is a remote diagnostic review covering five areas: Microsoft 365 licence utilisation, email authentication (DMARC, SPF, and DKIM), identity and access posture (Conditional Access policies, MFA enforcement, and stale accounts), endpoint compliance status (patch levels, device management, and Defender deployment), and backup coverage. You receive a written report with findings documented and a prioritised remediation list ranked by risk. No site visit is required. The report is yours regardless of what you decide next.

A full managed service engagement follows the health check if the findings warrant it and you choose to proceed. This is a structured 30/60/90-day onboarding programme that remediates all identified gaps, establishes your monitoring and alerting baseline, and transitions you onto our ongoing managed service. The ongoing service includes proactive monitoring, patch management, security operations, user support, and monthly reporting. Pricing is agreed in writing before any work begins, based on your user count and scope.

There is no obligation to proceed beyond the health check. We will not pursue you for a decision. If the findings are minor, we will tell you that.

Project work is scoped and priced upfront — you will know the full cost before we begin. Managed service engagements are structured on a per-user monthly basis covering everything within the agreed scope: proactive monitoring, patch management, security operations, user support, and administration.

We scope carefully and price honestly. Scope changes are agreed in advance with a clear cost impact stated before any work begins. Our goal is a long-term relationship built on delivery, not a contract built on ambiguity.

Yes - this is one of the areas where we consistently deliver disproportionate value. Public sector and healthcare procurement processes in Ireland require vendors to demonstrate a specific ICT security posture, and many SMEs fail at this stage not because their environment is insecure, but because they cannot document it adequately.

We have helped clients pass eTenders ICT compliance reviews that they previously failed. The typical gaps are: absence of a documented information security policy, no evidence of alignment to recognised security frameworks, incomplete asset registers, and lack of a tested business continuity or disaster recovery plan. All of these are correctable within a standard engagement.

For HSE and HIQA reviews, we are familiar with the Health Service Executive's ICT security requirements and the HIQA standards relating to data governance and system controls. We can prepare the security documentation pack, risk register, data processing records, and evidence portfolio that these reviews require. If you have a tender deadline, tell us the date and we will structure the engagement around it.

Yes. Being mid-contract does not prevent us from beginning the process and it does not cost you anything in the planning phase. We can run an IT Health Check regardless of your current contract status. The findings give you an objective, documented view of what your current provider is and is not delivering.

Once you know your contract end date, we design the transition timeline around it. We begin environment documentation and parallel configuration work during your notice period so that the handover happens on the day your current contract expires, with no gap in support coverage.

In some cases, the health check findings give clients the grounds to raise a formal service failure with their current provider, which can trigger early exit clauses. We are happy to advise on this, though we recommend taking independent legal advice on the specific terms of your contract. What we can say is that in every case where a client came to us mid-contract, the transition completed without disruption to their team and within the timeline we agreed.

Every finding in the health check report is supported by documented evidence. This means screenshots from the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, configuration exports from Entra ID or Intune, DMARC DNS record lookups, or audit log extracts, depending on the finding. You can verify every item independently, or present the report to your current provider and ask them to respond to each point.

The report is issued to you whether or not you proceed with 4DS. We do not withhold findings as a negotiating tool. We do not manufacture findings. We have told prospective clients on two separate occasions that their environment was well-managed and that switching would not deliver meaningful improvement. In both cases, we recommended they stay with their current provider.

We understand that this question comes from having been burned before. The most credible answer we can give is not a promise - it is the structure of the process itself. You receive the evidence. You can verify it. We gain nothing by exaggerating, and we lose clients we could have kept if we recommend unnecessary work.

We hear this regularly. The most common complaints are: slow response times with junior staff who don't understand the environment, recurring problems that never get permanently fixed, invoices that don't match expectations, and a sense that the provider is reactive rather than proactive. These are structural problems with how most IT providers operate, not individual failures.

The structural differences at 4DS are: you work directly with senior engineers who built and know your environment - there is no account manager, no tiered helpdesk, and no escalation queue. Senior engineers respond directly — no tiered helpdesk, no escalation queue. Engagements are scoped and priced upfront, so there is no incentive to generate work. We track ticket volume and report on reduction monthly, because our goal is to make reactive support less necessary over time, not more.

We are not asking you to take our word for it. The health check is specifically designed so that you can evaluate the quality of our work before making any commitment. The engineers who run the health check are the same engineers who would manage your environment. What you experience during the health check is exactly what you would experience as a client.