Area 03 · Operations and infrastructure

System administration

Servers rarely die dramatically. More often an environment limps along for years until a full disk, an expired certificate or a patch that was never installed brings payroll to a halt on the last day of the month. Good administration is about spotting those things before they hurt. Apply manages your servers, directory service, the identities in Microsoft 365 and your VMs from a distance, with a personal login for every engineer and a complete history of every change made.

Send an enquiry The four services

shared admin accounts; every login is personal

Windows + Linux

handled by one team, no finger-pointing

€110

an hour plus VAT for one-off jobs

from €69

including VAT, private remote session

Four services, from laptop to host

Anything from a single notebook throwing odd pop-ups for weeks to the host that carries every server your business runs. Each can be booked separately or bundled into a service plan.

Describe your case

PC clean-up and malware removal

The place to start when a machine crawls, shows adverts or triggers antivirus warnings. Frequently it saves you from buying a replacement.

Server administration

For companies with their own server, whether in a back room, a colocation rack or the cloud, that needs ongoing care: patching, monitoring, databases, disk space, certificates.

Active Directory and Entra ID

When accounts, groups and permissions have grown organically rather than by design, or when moving from an on-premises directory to the cloud is on the agenda.

Virtualisation

Helpful when choosing between Hyper-V, VMware and Proxmox, retiring ageing physical boxes, or untangling a cluster where nobody remembers what half the VMs are for.

Five findings we see almost everywhere

None of them breaks anything today. Each one, sooner or later, turns up in the post-mortem of a major outage. All five are fixable over remote access, typically in a matter of weeks.

The server OS is out of vendor support

Our response. A planned replacement including data transfer and a trial run, timed around year-end closing and holidays, instead of pushing it back to “next year” once more.

Every user is a local administrator

Our response. Standard accounts for daily work, elevated rights only on request and on record. Line-of-business apps that supposedly need admin rights usually run fine without them once configured properly.

One box does everything

Our response. Domain controller, file share, BMD database and print server on a single machine? We split the roles across virtual servers so one update cannot drag the whole company down.

Licences keep running for long-gone staff

Our response. An offboarding workflow that HR triggers, plus a twice-yearly review where each department head confirms who should reach which data.

Warnings land in a mailbox nobody opens

Our response. Alerts about storage, services and certificates reach a named person with enough lead time, rather than a “server reports” folder holding 4,000 unread messages.

An RDP port reachable from the internet is still a favourite entry point for ransomware gangs targeting small firms. Typically someone opened it “temporarily” during the first lockdown and it was never closed again. CERT.at regularly warns about exactly this kind of exposure. Our first review therefore hunts for open ports, accounts without multi-factor sign-in and systems the vendor no longer patches. Those get fixed before any cosmetic improvement.

Frequently asked questions

Surprisingly little. Name one person who understands how the company ticks, send over whatever server list exists, even a half-finished one, and give us a first route in; usually that is a VPN configured jointly over a video call. Automated discovery then maps your network and machines, and after a few days our decisions rest on data. Missing documentation from your old provider is no obstacle, because rebuilding it is part of onboarding.

We detect the fault remotely, identify the exact replacement part and raise the warranty claim with the manufacturer. The swap itself is done by a technician sent by the manufacturer, the data centre's remote-hands service or a member of your team following our illustrated instructions. We stay on a video call throughout and afterwards confirm the RAID array rebuilds cleanly.

Certainly. VPS, dedicated hardware or VMs on AWS or Azure: we work inside your account and your provider portal and leave things where they are unless there is good reason to move them. We only need the hosting contract to remain registered to your business, with separate delegated logins for our engineers.

Yes, everything beneath the application: operating system, SQL Server, disk space, backups, patching and access rights. Program updates and functional questions about the accounting or payroll software remain with the vendor or its reseller. We coordinate dates with them so that a version upgrade never collides with month-end closing.

Yes. Companies are billed €110 per hour plus VAT, or a flat price for well-defined jobs like a server move or a Microsoft 365 clean-up. Private individuals pay from €69 including VAT for a remote session and can book it via support@apply.at.

Tell us about your servers

How many servers do you have, where are they located and who takes care of them today? We will review what you send and tell you where we would begin.

Email
office@apply.at

Availability
Monday to Friday, 8:00-17:00 Austrian time (CET/CEST), reply within one working day

Meetings
By video on Microsoft Teams or Google Meet

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