IT support · Roanoke, VA
Roanoke IT support for the practices, firms and shops that keep the valley running
The Roanoke Valley is full of ten- and thirty-person businesses doing serious work with no one on staff to own their technology. That's who we built Star City IT for.
Walk down Campbell Avenue or through the office parks off Peters Creek Road and count the brass nameplates: physical therapists, CPA firms, insurance agencies, engineering consultants, dental offices, title companies. Almost none of them have an IT department. Usually there's an office manager who became the computer person by default, a vendor who installed something years ago, and a nephew who set up the Wi-Fi.
That arrangement holds together until the day it doesn't. A partner's email gets taken over and starts sending fake invoices to clients. The server under the front desk finally dies. An insurance carrier sends a cyber-liability renewal form asking about MFA and backups, and nobody knows the answers. Star City IT takes that weight off the office manager. We become the people who know how everything is set up, keep it secure, and fix it when it breaks.
Services
Day-to-day IT support and monitoring
When a printer stops working, Outlook won't open or a new employee needs a laptop, your staff contact us directly instead of interrupting the office manager.
Details →Security for firms that handle other people's money and records
The attacks hitting small Virginia businesses are rarely exotic.
Details →Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and cloud apps
Many valley offices are paying for Microsoft 365 and using about a third of it.
Details →Office networks, Wi-Fi and firewalls
We replace consumer routers and mystery switches with business equipment we can monitor and update.
Details →Backup and recovery
Every client gets backups of servers, cloud email and files, and important workstations, with copies stored off-site and protected against deletion by ransomware.
Details →HIPAA, PCI and compliance readiness
Health-care practices and their business associates need to meet HIPAA's security rule, anyone taking cards needs to meet PCI DSS, and accounting firms have their own…
Details →What to expect from us
Listen to the office manager
The person who has been holding things together usually knows exactly where the pain is. We start by asking them.
Fix the dangerous things first
Unprotected email, missing backups and shared passwords come before anything cosmetic. We rank the work by risk, not by what's easiest to sell.
Plan for the slow connections
Remote staff on rural internet get setups that work on modest bandwidth, with cloud sync and backups tuned so they don't swamp the line.
Leave a paper trail
Passwords stored properly, network diagrams drawn, vendors and renewals listed. If we ever part ways, you keep all of it.
A regional hub with a health-care heart and mountain edges
Carilion Clinic is the region's dominant employer, and its orbit shapes the local economy more than anything else. The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute sit in the Riverside area along the Roanoke River, and the Salem VA Medical Center serves veterans from across Southwest Virginia. Around those anchors is a wide ring of independent practices, home health agencies, billing services and specialty clinics, every one of them responsible for protecting patient records on its own small network.
The valley built its identity on the railroad, and that industrial streak never fully left. Salem has Yokohama's tire plant, Volvo builds heavy trucks down I-81 at its New River Valley plant in Dublin, and a long list of fabricators, suppliers and distributors sit along the interstate between them. Those businesses mix office computers with shop-floor equipment and often have a few machines nobody dares to update because they run something critical.
Then there's the geography. Mill Mountain looms over downtown, and once you leave the valley floor the internet options thin out quickly. Owners who live out at Smith Mountain Lake, employees working from home in Botetourt or Franklin County, and satellite offices in small towns all deal with connections that are slower and less reliable than what's available in the city. Good IT here has to account for the people at the end of a long country line, not just the ones downtown.
Common questions
We're a small practice in Salem. Is managed IT overkill for us?
Not if you handle patient or client data, which almost every practice does. A small office is a smaller target, but it's also less likely to notice an intrusion or have a backup that actually works. We scale the service to the size of the office, and for many small practices the bulk of the value is in security and backups rather than day-to-day support.
Our cyber insurance renewal asks about MFA, backups and endpoint protection. Can you help us answer it?
Yes. That form has become one of the most common reasons Roanoke businesses call us. We'll tell you which answers are currently true, put the missing controls in place, and keep records so you can answer next year's renewal with confidence instead of guesses.
Half our staff work from home out in the county with slow internet. Can you still support them?
We can. Our support is remote, so a home office in Fincastle gets the same help as a desk downtown. We'll also look at what the slow connection can realistically handle and adjust things like cloud backup schedules and file syncing so the line stays usable during the workday.
Do you only work in Roanoke city?
No. We support businesses across the Roanoke Valley and beyond, including Salem, Vinton, Botetourt County, Bedford, the Smith Mountain Lake area and the New River Valley around Blacksburg and Christiansburg.
We have an old server in a closet that runs our main software. What happens to it?
First we find out what it actually does and whether the software vendor offers a cloud version. Sometimes the right answer is to move off it, sometimes it's to replace it with newer hardware, and sometimes it's to keep it running safely for a while longer behind better protection and backups. We'll give you the options and the tradeoffs in plain terms.
Businesses we support
Medical, dental and therapy practices
Independent clinicians across the valley handle the same protected health information as the big hospital systems, without the security staff. We set up HIPAA-minded safeguards such as encrypted devices, MFA, email filtering and audit-ready backups, and we keep the practice management and imaging workstations healthy.
Accounting, legal and title firms
Firms near the courthouse and in the Towers Shopping Center area move sensitive financial documents and wire instructions every day. Wire fraud through compromised email is the threat we worry about most for them, so we focus on email security, MFA, and training staff to verify payment changes by phone.
Manufacturers and suppliers along I-81
Shops in Salem, Botetourt and toward the New River Valley run office systems beside production equipment, and both matter. We separate the shop floor network from the front office, protect the machines that can't be patched, and help suppliers answer customer security requirements.
Outdoor, hospitality and tourism businesses
The region has leaned hard into its Blue Ridge Parkway and greenway identity, and outfitters, breweries, inns and lake marinas have grown with it. They need reliable card processing, guest Wi-Fi kept apart from business systems, and a setup that survives seasonal staff turning over every spring.
Give the office manager a break
Email or call us about your office and the IT headaches you're carrying. We'll reply with honest questions and a sense of where we'd start.