IT support for the Glass City's working businesses

Glass is the industry Toledo is named for, and it remains a genuine specialty: architectural and automotive glass, solar and coatings, glass processing equipment and the research and engineering firms attached to that expertise. These are process manufacturers, which means continuous operations, furnace and line control systems, quality and measurement equipment, and downtime that carries a very high cost per hour. Their control systems typically run software that will never be certified for patching, so the correct approach is architectural: dedicated segments, tightly defined traffic rules, no direct internet path, and continuous monitoring of the boundary between production and the office.

Automotive assembly and the supplier base give the region its second character, stretching through Toledo, Northwood, Perrysburg, Maumee and out into the surrounding counties. Tier one and tier two suppliers live under customer requirements that leave little room: EDI transmissions on schedule, quality data available on demand, traceability records retained, and increasingly a set of cybersecurity expectations pushed down from the automakers. A missed transmission is a chargeback conversation. We monitor the servers, connections and scheduled jobs behind those transmissions continuously, and we document the security controls suppliers are being asked to evidence.

The port and the logistics economy along the lake and the interstates add another layer, bulk cargo handling, rail interchange, warehousing, trucking and freight services. Those businesses run scheduling, dispatch and warehouse systems where an outage means idle equipment and drivers. Meanwhile healthcare across the metro, the university and medical center community, and the professional firms downtown and in Sylvania and Maumee all carry data obligations and face the same email fraud attempts that hit every American business. Those clients run on our remote support service.

The pattern we correct most often is a flat network where everything sees everything. It is how most Toledo shops grew, because it worked at ten people and nobody revisited it. Splitting the production network from the office network, putting modern endpoint detection on the office side, enforcing MFA and testing the restores removes the majority of realistic risk for a modest cost. That is the substance of our security service, delivered with everything else under our managed IT plan at one flat monthly cost per user.