IT checklist: 10 things to sort out before moving into a new office in Limassol
A familiar scene: the office is rented, the furniture is in, the laptops are bought — and nobody thought about the internet until the day before opening. For the first week, everyone is working off a phone hotspot. IT rarely makes it onto the moving checklist, even though nothing else works without it.
Who this is for
This checklist is for companies renting or moving into an office in Limassol: 5–50 people, usually no in-house IT person, with internet and Wi-Fi handled by whoever on the team has time for it. If your office has been running for a while already, it's worth checking some of these too — they're commonly skipped from day one and never revisited.
Network and internet
The most common mistake is ordering internet at the last minute and placing access points by eye — wherever there happens to be a socket.
- Fibre plus a backup line. The building should have fibre internet, and there should be a backup 4G/5G router for provider outages. Switching to the backup should be automatic or quick, not something that needs a support call mid-workday.
- Don't guess at Wi-Fi coverage. Before installing access points, a proper site survey is worth doing — it shows how many access points you need and exactly where, accounting for walls, floors and the shape of the space. We run these surveys with professional software (Ekahau) — you can see what that looks like in practice here.
- A separate guest Wi-Fi network. Guests and contractors have no reason to be on the same network as your printers, shared storage and accounting software. A separate guest network is a standard setting on any business-grade router.
- Change factory passwords on day one. This applies to the router and the access points: default admin logins are often tied to the device model and easy to find online.
- A UPS on the router and server. A short power dip shouldn't take down internet for the whole office or corrupt data on the server — a battery backup good for 10–15 minutes covers this in one step.
Email and files
- Company-domain email, not personal Gmail or Outlook.com addresses. Corporate email (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) survives an employee leaving — client correspondence stays with the company, not with someone who might resign tomorrow.
- Shared cloud folders with proper access rights, instead of "a USB stick with the accountant" or files scattered across personal computers. Each person should only have access to what their job needs.
If you haven't checked yet whether your company's email is protected against being spoofed, it's a one-minute, free check — we wrote about it in our piece on free domain checking.
Security
- Two-factor authentication (2FA) on every work account: email, bank, company social media. This single setting closes off most cases where a password leaked or got guessed.
- A password manager for the team, not a spreadsheet or notes app. The router password and network layout should live there too, instead of in one person's head.
- Disk encryption on laptops (BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on Mac). A laptop lost or stolen without encryption means every file and every browser-saved password is exposed — not just the cost of the hardware.
What to do today
- If a move is already scheduled, order the internet line at least 2–3 weeks ahead — wiring and provisioning take time.
- Book a Wi-Fi site survey before access points get bought and installed by guesswork.
- Set up company-domain email if the team is still on personal Gmail accounts.
- Turn on 2FA for email and banking — this can be done today, no contractor needed.
- Pick a team password manager and move passwords out of spreadsheets into it.
If a contractor handles your IT
If your network setup is handled by an external contractor, it's worth asking directly:
- Did they run a Wi-Fi site survey, or just place access points by eye?
- Is the guest network separated from the work network?
- Were factory passwords changed on the router and access points?
- Is disk encryption and 2FA set up on work accounts?
Vague answers to these are a useful signal in themselves — better to know before the move than after.
Opening or moving into an office in Limassol? Message us on Telegram or at info@nextgenit.com.cy — we'll go through what your setup actually needs for free, and you can also run a free domain check on your email and website security.