Retail and restaurants
The till, the card terminal, online booking and the guest Wi-Fi usually share one router with nothing separating them. The till itself is never backed up.
Our own city
Business IT support in Nice
MZ Informatique is based in Nice, at 4 rue de Grammont. We support small and medium businesses across the city in three disciplines — cybersecurity, bespoke software development and artificial intelligence — and we come to you, rather than working from a call centre at the other end of the country. This page is in English because a real part of the business community here works in English.
4 rue de Grammont, 06100 Nice · Mon–Fri 9:30am–5pm · Response time across Nice: within 24 hours in an emergency
The ground
What running business IT in Nice actually means
Nice is the préfecture of the Alpes-Maritimes and the fifth-largest city in France by population. Its economy does not rest on a handful of large industrial sites but on a very dense fabric of small organisations: independent shops, restaurants, hotels, professional practices, estate and letting agencies, consultancies, building trades. Businesses of three to thirty people, in which IT is nobody's actual job.
That structure has a direct consequence for our work: there is almost never an IT person on the other side of the table. There is an owner with more pressing problems, an office manager who "knows a bit about computers", and a system assembled over the years by a succession of providers. Our first job is not technical — it is to rebuild an overall picture that nobody holds any more.
For an English-speaking manager there is a second layer to that. The tools a business here runs on — accounting packages, bank portals, insurer questionnaires, the paperwork around employment — are almost all in French, and so is the support behind them. Technical decisions therefore tend to get taken on trust, or deferred. Being able to have the conversation in English does not change the underlying system, but it does change how much of it you actually understand before you sign anything.
Tourism sets the rhythm for a large share of this economy. In Nice the seasonality is real but spread out: the airport, business travel and longer-stay visitors keep activity going all year, where other coastal towns live off a few weeks. The IT consequences are concrete — headcount that moves, accounts created in a hurry, equipment that must not fail in high season.
The city also hosts more structured activity, around the plaine du Var and its business districts, its hospitals and its universities. You meet firms there facing heavier requirements — client security questionnaires, sector obligations, sensitive data hosting — without anything like the resources of a large company.
We work across the whole commune, with no district or business park excluded: the city centre and the Carré d'Or, Libération, Cimiez, Riquier and the port, Nice-Nord, l'Ariane, Saint-Isidore and the plaine du Var, Saint-Augustin and the western districts. Site visits start from 4 rue de Grammont. And where turning up adds nothing — a mailbox that will not open, software that refuses to start, a workstation to reconfigure — the work is done remotely, with your consent at every connection.
Situations we meet
Four typical set-ups in a Nice business
These are not client cases — we publish none until the companies concerned have given written consent. They are configurations that recur from one business to the next.
Hotels and holiday lets
Seasonal staff share a single login created one summer and never disabled. Guest data passes through booking platforms whose settings nobody has ever read.
Professional and healthcare practices
Law firms, accountants, clinicians: the value sits in the files. Hosting health data carries its own obligations, to be checked with the software publisher.
Property, relocation and services to international clients
Agencies and managing agents hold identity documents, tenancy files and bank details for clients living abroad — handled by email, and prime material for payment fraud.
What we do
Three disciplines, available separately
We do not sell bundles. A business in Nice may need nothing more than its backups put straight, or only a tool that removes a daily round of re-typing.
Cybersecurity
Protecting a business that has no IT department.
- A review of what exists and a written action plan
- Backups that are tested, not merely configured
- Staff awareness sessions, seasonal workers included
Software development
A tool cut to your trade, and owned by you.
- Line-of-business apps replacing shared spreadsheets
- Connecting software that currently ignores each other
- Code and hosting in your name from day one
Under-used
Artificial intelligence
Automating what repeats, without replacing your tools.
- A use case costed in hours saved per week
- Handling documents and incoming enquiries
- Data hosted in France or in the European Union
How we work
On site in Nice, remote where that is more effective
What happens on site
Maintenance, hardware replacement, cabling, installing a server or a NAS, recovering from an incident and the first audit all mean coming to you. Being based in Nice changes two things in practice: the travel time, and the fact that we already know the operator, the type of connection and the electrical installation of an older building in the city centre.
within 24 hours in an emergency The response time we genuinely hold across Nice — in working hours, outside any on-call arrangement — to be confirmed before publication.
What is run remotely
Software development, AI integration, backup monitoring and most software troubleshooting are handled remotely, with one or two visits at the moments that matter: scoping at the start, go-live at the end. That lowers your cost without depriving you of someone who turns up in person when the situation calls for it.
We install no permanent remote-control tool without telling you, and any access we do hold can be revoked by you at any time.
Local references
Our published reference in Nice is Paradigm, a business centre and registered-address provider in the city, for whom we brought the registered address, scanned mail, room booking and member introductions together into a single platform. Read the case study.
The other work we have done in Nice is not named here: we publish a client's name only with their written consent, and an invented reference is checked in a single search.
Frequently asked
What businesses in Nice ask us
Can we deal with you in English?
Yes — this page and the rest of this site exist for that reason. Meetings, reports and the written action plan can be in English. Where a third party is involved, your software publisher or your internet provider, we deal with them in French on your behalf and tell you in English what was said.
Do you actually travel out, or is everything done remotely?
We travel out. Our office is in Nice, at 4 rue de Grammont, and part of our work cannot be done any other way: hardware, networks, recovery after an incident. The travel time within the city is still to be confirmed (within 24 hours in an emergency).
There are five of us. Are we too small?
No — that is the most common size among the businesses we see in Nice. A firm of five carries exactly the same risks as one of fifty — compromised email, ransomware, data loss — with far less to meet them with. The free initial audit exists precisely to work out what deserves money spent on it and what deserves none.
Our business software comes from a publisher. Do you still get involved?
Yes, and we are not trying to replace it. Our work then covers everything around it: workstations, backups, access, and sometimes connecting that software to your other tools to remove double entry. When something off the shelf beats a bespoke build, we say so.
A stocktake before any decision
The initial audit is free, the report is yours, and you remain free to do nothing afterwards.