IT support and business phone systems in Blackburn

Distance

About 12 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 20 minutes

Main route

M65 J4-J6

Postcode areas

BB1, BB2, BB3

Dialling code

01254 Shared with Accrington and Darwen

County

Lancashire

A bigger, more varied market than the rest of East Lancashire

Blackburn is one of the largest towns in the country without city status, and the business base reflects that scale. Food and drink manufacturing is significant, as is textiles - both the traditional trade and the modern technical-textiles side - alongside engineering, print, construction supply, and a substantial wholesale and import sector. Add a large public-sector and healthcare employer base and a professional services layer serving all of it, and you have a genuinely mixed economy rather than a single-industry town.

The main commercial locations sprawl accordingly: Whitebirk and Roman Road on the Accrington side, Shadsworth Business Park and the estates off junction 5, Furthergate and the older industrial belt near the town centre, plus Darwen's own industrial base a few miles south.

Being blunt about the competitive position: Blackburn has plenty of IT companies. Some are very good. We are twenty minutes away rather than five, so we do not win on proximity alone here - we win, when we do, on being straightforward about scope and price, and on not selling you a managed service you do not need.

Audits, not hackers, are what drives security spend here

Ask a Blackburn manufacturer or food producer why they finally sorted out their IT security and the answer is rarely "we were worried about ransomware". It is that a customer sent a questionnaire, or an auditor asked a question they could not answer, or a tender required evidence.

That is a perfectly rational way to end up doing the right thing, and it changes what "good" looks like. What you need is not a wall of products; it is the ability to answer, with evidence:

• Who has access to what, and how is it removed when someone leaves?
• How are systems patched, and how do you know it worked?
• What is backed up, how often, and when did you last restore something?
• What happens in the first hour of an incident, and who decides?
• Is multi-factor authentication on, everywhere, including the accounts people forget?

Our small business IT security checklist is a reasonable starting audit. If a customer specifically asks about Cyber Essentials, that guide explains what the certification involves and what it costs to get - it is a genuinely achievable target for most SMEs, and increasingly a tender requirement.

Multi-site is where Blackburn businesses get caught by 2027

Plenty of Blackburn firms operate from more than one location - a head office and a warehouse, a factory and a trade counter, or several depots across the North West. The PSTN switch-off on 31 January 2027 is much harder to manage across several sites than one, for reasons that are entirely practical:

• Each site has its own lines, its own alarm contract and its own quirks.
• The connectivity available differs site by site, so the same replacement design does not fit everywhere.
• Numbers on different exchanges port on different timescales.
• Nobody has a complete list of the lines, because the list lives across three people's inboxes and one filing cabinet.

The way through is a proper inventory and a phased plan rather than a big-bang cutover. Our switch-off checklist sets out the sequence we use, and the deadline guide covers how much time is genuinely left.

Call recording and the order-taking floor

One thing that comes up more in Blackburn than in the smaller towns around us is sales and order-taking at volume - wholesalers, distributors and trade counters where the phone is the business. Legacy phone systems handle that badly: no useful reporting, no recording without an expensive bolt-on, and no visibility of abandoned calls.

Moving to hosted telephony makes that data free, effectively. You can see how many calls you missed, when, and on which line - which is usually an uncomfortable but valuable first report. If you record calls, do it properly: call recording carries data-protection obligations around notification, retention and access requests, and "we tick the box in the portal" is not a compliance position.