IT support and business phone systems in Preston

Distance

About 22 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 30 minutes

Main route

M65 westbound to J1

Postcode areas

PR1, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5

Dialling code

01772

County

Lancashire

A professional services city

Preston is not a mill town that grew. It is the county's administrative centre - county council, courts, a large NHS trust, a substantial university - and the private sector that has grown around that is heavily professional: law, accountancy, financial advice, architecture, engineering consultancy, recruitment and marketing.

Geographically that splits between the Georgian professional quarter around Winckley Square and the city centre, and the out-of-town business space at Red Scar, Preston East, the Docklands at Riversway and the parks towards Cuerden and Bamber Bridge.

The work we do for a Preston law firm looks quite different from what we do for a Nelson manufacturer, and it is worth naming why.

When your data is somebody else's confidential information

Professional firms hold information that belongs to other people, often under a regulatory duty. That raises the floor on what "adequate IT" means:

• Access control has to be demonstrable. Not "only the partners can see it" but a record of who can see what and how that was decided.
• Leavers must actually lose access. The most common real-world failure in professional firms is a leaver whose account stays live for months.
• Email is the attack surface. Invoice redirection fraud - a compromised or spoofed mailbox changing bank details on a completion statement - is the incident that actually happens to firms in this sector, far more often than a dramatic ransomware event. Multi-factor authentication, mailbox rule monitoring and a verbal verification policy for payment changes are the defences that work.
• Retention has to be deliberate. Keeping everything forever is a liability, not a safety net. Our GDPR and IT guide covers the practical obligations.
• Certification increasingly matters. Public-sector work and larger client tenders often ask for evidence, and Cyber Essentials is the usual baseline requested. That guide explains what achieving it involves.

Call recording is a compliance question, not a feature

Firms in financial services, insurance and some legal work either must record calls or benefit heavily from doing so. Hosted telephony makes it trivially easy, which is exactly the problem: it is easy to turn on and easy to do unlawfully.

The things that need deciding before you switch it on are who is told and how, how long recordings are kept and what deletes them, who can listen and whether that is logged, and how you handle a subject access request for a recording. Our guide to call recording and compliance sets out the framework. A provider who sells you recording without asking any of those questions has told you something about the provider.

Two very different connectivity pictures

Preston's professional quarter is full of listed and period buildings converted into offices. They are lovely and they are frequently difficult - shared risers, no obvious route for new fibre, a landlord who must consent to any work, and existing cabling installed by whoever was cheapest in 1998. Lead times for a leased line into a building like that are driven by wayleaves and access, not by technology.

The out-of-town parks are the opposite: modern, well ducted, usually straightforward.

Either way, get the survey before the budget. And when comparing providers, compare what actually differs - contract length, price on renewal, who fixes a fault and how fast - rather than the headline monthly figure. Our guide to choosing a provider covers what to look at as the analogue products disappear before 31 January 2027.