Held to tolerance on the floor. Held together with hope on the network.
You measure every part before it ships. Nobody is measuring the systems that hold your drawings, your quality records, and your machine controllers. Overwatch Technology is the IT and security team for manufacturers who can't afford to stop the line.
No pitch deck. One call, then a written findings sheet you keep either way.
Failure modes
None of them are a slow laptop. All of them are IT problems that show up as production, customer, or audit problems.
Mode 01 · Production
Machine controllers on unsupported Windows sit on the same network as email. One click in the front office and the CNC cells, the ERP, and the shipping labels go down together. Recovery is measured in weeks, not hours, when the backup was never restore-tested.
Mode 02 · Drawings & IP
Customer drawings, CAM programs, and process specs are often the most valuable thing in the building, and many come with strings attached: NDAs, export controls on defense work, or CMMC requirements in the contract. If they sit on an open share or a personal cloud account, you can't say who has them.
Mode 03 · Quality & contracts
Quality records, traceability, certs of conformance, and inspection data all have retention expectations, whether you answer to ISO 9001, AS9100, an FDA auditor, or a customer's supplier quality team. “We think it's on the server” is not an answer during an audit or a bid review.
Signature check
You already trust a gauge more than an opinion. Nine checks, same idea: a part either passes or it doesn't. Answer honestly; nothing is sent anywhere.
Drawings, CAD/CAM files, and process specs live in one controlled place, not on open shares, USB sticks, and personal cloud accounts.
You can name, today, every person and account that can open customer drawings, and a departing employee loses access the same day.
Your ERP, quality records, and traceability data are backed up off-site, and a restore was actually tested in the last 90 days.
Machine controllers and inspection equipment on older operating systems are segmented away from the business network.
Multi-factor authentication is on email, VPN, and every remote-access path, including the owner's account and any vendor that remotes in to a machine.
If a customer or auditor sent a security questionnaire this week, whether CMMC, ITAR, or their own supplier requirements, you could answer it with evidence.
Your ERP and shop-floor systems have a tested recovery plan with a known recovery time, not just a backup job that reports green.
The controls you attested to on your cyber insurance application are all still in place and provable.
Someone is watching and responding to alerts at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, not reading them Monday morning.
Answer the checks above and this line will tell you where you stand.
Get the written findingsScope of work
One team for the whole stack: front office, shop floor, and the paperwork that proves both are under control.
Move drawings, CAM programs, and process documentation into a workspace where access is restricted, logged, and reportable.
Keep production running and keep the machines from becoming the way in.
Monitoring and response across endpoints, servers, and cloud accounts.
Map your environment to the frameworks your customers and auditors care about, then close the gaps in a sequence you can afford.
Straight answers
Most plant IT is one person keeping printers and email alive. That's real work, and we don't replace it. We back it up with the after-hours coverage, the security tooling, and the compliance documentation one person can't produce alone. If your IT person is good, they usually want us there.
Manufacturing has constraints most MSPs have never met: machine controllers that can't be patched, an ERP the whole plant runs on, customer drawings under NDA, and for defense and aerospace suppliers, export controls and CMMC. We build around those constraints instead of ignoring them.
No. Production comes first. Segmentation and hardening happen in scheduled windows, and anything that touches a machine cell gets tested before it ships. We'd rather take an extra month than lose you a shift.
A scoping call, a walk-through of your environment, and a written findings sheet listing what we found, what it puts at risk, and what it would cost to fix, ranked. The findings sheet is yours whether or not you hire us.
Tell us how many people you have, what you run the floor on, and where your drawings live. We'll tell you what's exposed, in writing, in about a week.
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