FAQ
Is Sentry CTO the Right Fit? A Guide to Choosing Your Cybersecurity and IT Support Provider
Choosing an I.T. and cybersecurity provider is a decision most businesses make maybe twice a decade, under pressure, with no practice. Providers know this, which is why so much of the industry’s marketing is engineered to make every provider sound like the right one for everybody.
We would rather do the opposite: tell you exactly who we work well with and who we do not, so you can rule us in or out before either of us spends a meeting finding out. Roughly half the people who read a page like this correctly conclude we are not their answer. That is the page working.
How We Approach the Work
Everything starts with a Sentry Inspect assessment: thirty days examining your people, processes, and technology across nine areas, ending in a written report and a briefing your leadership can actually use. We do not quote a monthly price before an assessment, because a number invented before looking is a guess, and you would be right not to trust it.
After the assessment, ongoing service is built on two principles. First, security is the foundation, not an add-on: protection, monitoring, and response are woven through everything rather than sold as extras. Second, we act as your technology partner: regular reviews, honest advice, and planning that treats your technology as something that should make you money, not just something that should stop breaking.
The Honest Fit Test
Technology failure would genuinely hurt you. A lost week costs real money or real trust.
Someone can make a decision and make it stick. Security is a series of trade-offs, and trade-offs need an owner with authority.
You would rather hear an uncomfortable finding than a reassuring summary.
You hold information other people trusted you with. Client files, donor records, member data, patient information.
You want a technology partner, not a number to call after something breaks.
Lowest price is the deciding factor. We are not the cheapest option in Arizona and are not trying to be. If the cheaper quote wins by default, take it with our blessing.
You only want reactive support. You absolutely can call us when something breaks. But if that is the whole arrangement you want, we are an expensive way to buy it.
Nobody has final authority on security decisions. This is the one that actually predicts failure. We learned it by losing a client over it.
You want the controls but not the constraints. Real security means admin rights go away and logins take an extra step. We can make that painless; we cannot make it invisible.
You are larger than about 250 people. Past that, a firm with a larger bench serves you better, and we will say so.
That second list is not false modesty. Every line on it comes from a real engagement that taught us something, and the full stories are on our page about who we are not for.
How to Pressure-Test Any Provider, Including Us
Whoever you are evaluating, three questions separate substance from brochure:
- “What are your actual support hours, and what happens outside them?” Watch for “24/7 support” that turns out to mean 24/7 monitoring with a nine-to-five help desk. Ours: security monitoring and response run 24/7/365; the help desk runs 8am to 5pm weekdays, and urgent issues outside those hours reach someone. Any provider should be able to state their equivalent this plainly.
- “What would you refuse to do?” A provider with no boundaries has no expertise.
- “Who are you not a good fit for?” If the answer is “everyone benefits from our services,” they are guessing about you. You have just read our answer.
If the Fit Looks Right
The next step is deliberately small: a fifteen-minute Compatibility Consult. You talk, we listen, and at the end we decide together whether an assessment makes sense. No proposal, no pressure, and “no” is a perfectly good outcome.
