The £10k False Economy: When Cheap IT Becomes Your Biggest Liability

Episode notes

It starts with a tempting spreadsheet: 25 staff, a cheaper IT quote that shaves £35 per user off the bill — £10,500 a year saved, instantly seductive. Noel Bradford and Mauven McLeod open this episode by turning that neat number upside down and asking the one question every business owner should be able to answer: what exactly has been removed from the service to make that price possible? They walk you through a story many business owners will recognise — a colourful LinkedIn pitch that sells confidence and hides compromises. The cheap provider isn’t performing miracles; they’re quietly cutting controls: enforced MFA, disciplined patching, active monitoring, behaviour-based endpoint defence, security training, incident response and documented processes. Those missing pieces turn an attractive short-term saving into a long-term gamble. Noel and Mauven do the arithmetic and show you the cold UK data: the DCIT survey found 43% of UK businesses suffered an incident in 2024, phishing hit 85% and even a 1% ransomware prevalence still means roughly 19,000 organisations were devastated.