Frequently asked questions

We are based in Barnsley and support businesses right across Yorkshire and the surrounding regions — Barnsley, Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Wakefield, Leeds, Huddersfield, York, Harrogate, Bradford, Hull and the East Riding are all routine for us, and our remote support reaches you wherever you are.

From Barnsley, most of South Yorkshire is inside a 30 to 45 minute drive, so same-working-day attendance is normal for anything that genuinely needs hands on hardware. Critical faults carry a four hour fix target, with a one hour response target on all contracted calls.

Genuinely local. Yorkshire Business Systems has operated from Barnsley since 2001 and the engineers who answer the phone are the engineers who visit your site. There is no offshore first line and no ticket triage desk between you and a fix.

Small and medium businesses are our core work. Contracts start at five users, and a large share of our clients sit between five and fifty staff — single-site offices, workshops, professional practices and manufacturers across the region.

No. Contracted support includes on-site attendance within our normal coverage area, so there is no mileage line arriving after a visit. Work well outside the region is agreed in advance before anyone gets in a van.

Yes, and we would prefer to. A no-obligation review on site tells us far more than a phone call: users, devices, servers, licensing, backups and security get documented, and you get an itemised proposal you are free to walk away from.

A broad mix — manufacturing and engineering firms, professional services, accountants and solicitors, charities, care providers and retail operations. The common thread is a business between roughly five and a hundred users that needs IT to be dependable rather than fashionable.

You are straight through to an engineer — there is no call queue and no first-line script reading. Phone calls are answered by the person who will fix the problem, and emails to itsupport@ybs-ltd.com are typically responded to within 30 minutes during business hours.

Yes. We are a small, long-standing team, so the engineer who picks up already knows your network, your servers and your quirks. Nothing has to be explained from scratch.

Both. The majority of issues are resolved remotely within minutes through our secure remote support portal. When something needs hands on hardware, an engineer attends — we are Barnsley based and cover Yorkshire and the surrounding region.

Standard cover is during normal UK business hours. Out-of-hours and planned weekend work — migrations, server replacements, office moves — are arranged in advance so the disruption lands when nobody is trying to work.

No. Contracted support is a fixed annual cost per user, so there is no meter running while you decide whether a problem is worth reporting. That is deliberate: we would rather hear about the small things before they become outages.

It is built from what you actually need: users covered for general IT support, plus optional hardware cover per workstation, laptop or server, server support, cloud and SharePoint support, and security or backup bundles. Our quote builder gives you an indicative annual range in about a minute.

Two reasons. Our published rates would tell competitors exactly what we charge, and a headline figure rarely matches a real environment. Every quote we send is fully itemised, so you can see precisely what each element costs before you commit — we are transparent with you, just not with the whole internet.

Contracts run annually. We have clients who have stayed with us for well over a decade, and that is because the service is worth renewing rather than because they are locked in.

Yes — new starters and new equipment are added pro-rata and picked up by support immediately. You are never waiting for a renewal date to get someone covered.

Hardware and software purchases, third-party licensing and major project work such as full site migrations are quoted separately. Everything within the scope of the contract, including the labour on covered hardware repairs, is included.

Not in the way most people assume. Microsoft protects the platform and offers limited retention, but deleted or maliciously encrypted data is your responsibility. We add independent Microsoft 365 backup through our partner Redstor so mailboxes, SharePoint and OneDrive can be restored to a point in time.

The built-in filter handles bulk spam well. It is much weaker against targeted phishing, conversation hijacking and links that are weaponised after delivery. We layer SpamTitan at the gateway and PhishTitan inside the mailbox, with ArcTitan archiving behind them, which closes those specific gaps.

No, and this surprises people. Modern attack kits proxy the real Microsoft login page and steal the session after the MFA prompt is satisfied. MFA is essential but it needs pairing with link protection, conditional access and staff who recognise the pattern.

Often, but not always. Moving documents to SharePoint removes a lot of physical risk and makes compliance far easier to evidence. Some line-of-business applications genuinely still need a local server, so we assess it honestly rather than pushing cloud for the sake of it.

It performs address translation, which blocks unsolicited inbound traffic, but it inspects nothing. A business firewall such as a Zyxel USG FLEX adds intrusion prevention, malware scanning, content filtering, network segmentation and logging you can investigate after an incident.

No, but there is an advantage to it. Kit we supply is specified for supportability, arrives imaged and licensed, and can be placed straight onto hardware maintenance cover with parts and labour included.

We start with a no-obligation review of what you have: users, devices, servers, licensing, backups and security. From there you get an itemised proposal. Once agreed, we document the estate, deploy monitoring and take over support — usually with no downtime for users at all.

It happens. We are used to rebuilding documentation, recovering domain and tenant control and taking ownership of licensing from scratch. It adds a little time at the start and nothing to your ongoing service.

Yorkshire Business Systems was founded in 2001 and has supported businesses across the region continuously since — around 25 years of doing the same thing properly.

Please do. Our speed test, open port scanner and URL and IP threat scanner are free, require no sign-up, and will give you a genuine read on your connection and your perimeter before you speak to anyone.