Network infrastructure for businesses in Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes

Everything your applications run on, and that nobody looks at until it stops. The cabling and the patch panel; the active equipment — switches, router, firewall; business Wi-Fi and its guest network; remote access for home working and for secondary sites; the servers and the file storage; and finally the uninterruptible power supply feeding the cabinet.

At MZ Informatique this foundation is not handled separately from the rest: it carries the business application we develop, it moves the traffic through the integrations, and it is exactly what cybersecurity sets out to protect. That is why we hold it ourselves rather than subcontracting it.

Because it is designed for a home, not for twenty people moving around a building. Three differences genuinely count. Coverage: several access points spread out and managed together, rather than a single point and repeaters that halve the throughput. Roaming: a laptop or a phone moves from one access point to the next without dropping, which changes everything on a video call. Network separation: a segregated guest network for visitors, a network for the workstations, and where necessary a dedicated network for connected equipment — cameras, printers, till terminals.

That last point is as much a security question as a comfort one: a visitor, a printer or a camera should never sit on the same segment as your file server.

With a properly configured VPN, and with two-factor authentication — the absence of the latter being one of the three gaps we find in almost every IT estate we audit on the French Riviera. The principle is simple: no admin interface, no remote desktop and no file server should be reachable directly from the internet. Access goes through an encrypted tunnel, with named accounts and a record of who connects.

We take the opportunity to tidy up: former employees' accounts disabled, administrator rights cut back to the people who genuinely need them, and firewall rules documented rather than stacked up over the years.

It depends on three things, and on no fashion at all. The volume of files handled day to day: heavy files shared internally are often more comfortable on a local server. The quality of your internet link: moving everything online assumes a connection, and a fallback, that are up to it. The sensitivity of the data, which may require certain processing to stay on your own infrastructure.

In most of the small businesses we work with the answer is mixed: email and office software online, heavy files and the line-of-business software local, and an off-site backup covering both. What matters is not the location but the fact that somebody can say where each piece of data lives.

It is costed after a visit on site: the length of cabling, the state of what is already there and the layout of the premises weigh more than the number of workstations. The costing is set out on the quotation, drawn up after the survey. Workstations and heavier machines built, configured and sized for the work you actually do are costed separately, also on the quotation.

Monitoring of the network and the servers can be folded into the monthly maintenance retainer. As with the rest of our work, equipment and subscriptions are taken out in your own name: you are never tied to one supplier just to keep your own network running.