Article
The first office grew organically—whatever got the company through the week. That is forgivable. What breaks companies is copying that improvisation at every new location.
The second site gets a different firewall because a different person set it up. The third gets whatever the local ISP bundled. By the fifth, every outage starts with twenty minutes of figuring out how this particular site even works, and the one person who knows is on vacation.
The question to ask before the lease is signed
Would you let this scale? If the way you launched your last site were repeated ten more times, would you have an operation—or ten islands?
What a site standard contains
One network design: same firewall platform, same Wi-Fi standard, same segmentation, sized to the site. One connectivity playbook: primary circuit, failover, and who manages the ISP relationship. One documentation rule: every closet photographed, labeled, and recorded before go-live. One support model: employees at the new site get help exactly the way every other site does, on day one.
With that in place, opening a location is procurement plus a checklist. Without it, every launch is a bespoke project with bespoke failures—and the cost shows up for years, in every ticket that starts with “well, that site is a special case.”
Growth should make your operation more standard, not less. If each new site makes your environment weirder, the problem is not the sites.
— IAN BERKOWITZ, FOUNDER & CEO, IRONGUARD IT