IT Mystery exists because the same questions kept coming up, and because most of the answers available online were either too technical to act on or written by someone trying to sell something.
The site is produced under the direction of Jerry Gartner, an IT professional who has been doing hands-on work for small businesses and non-profits since 2003. That’s more than two decades of network builds, security rollouts, backup recoveries, and the support calls that follow when a product choice goes wrong. The work has been in real offices — not enterprise data centers. Small teams, limited budgets, no dedicated IT staff. The kind of environment where a wrong call costs an afternoon, not a postmortem.
IT Mystery covers the technology decisions that come up most often in those environments: what to use, how to set it up, and what to do when it breaks. Every article is reviewed against a simple test before it publishes: if it isn’t an answer we’d stand behind in a client conversation, it doesn’t go up.
What you’ll find here
The site focuses on four areas where small businesses and non-profits consistently need practical guidance:
- Security — what to do after a phishing attempt, how to set up MFA that people will actually use, what a small office actually needs versus what enterprise vendors will try to sell them
- Backup and recovery — not just how to set up backups, but how to verify they work before you need them
- Microsoft 365 and productivity tools — the real cost, what’s worth paying for, and the features most offices don’t know they have
- Windows and networking — the day-to-day problems that eat support time: update failures, Wi-Fi drops, remote access, device management
How recommendations work
Products are evaluated on total real cost, setup burden, ongoing management demand, and vendor support quality — in that order. Commission rates don’t enter the evaluation. See how we evaluate →
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through them, IT Mystery may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The disclosure is at the top of every article that contains them.
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